Rail heads

Don't believe the news of model railroading's decline.

Tucked away near a Fort Myers industrial park, Richard Taylor is busy putting together elaborate train sets in a facility that resembles Santa's workshop. His backlog of work is a full year.

Taylor and childhood friend Don Stanger are busy working on model railroad landscapes that cost $70,000 on average. Clients include celebrities, hedge fund managers and wealthy entrepreneurs.

The landscapes are so big that some clients have built steel buildings specifically for their model railroads. The biggest landscape Taylor has built measured 85 feet by 50 feet.
Fort Myers-based Master Model Railroad Consulting Services is more cooperative than a traditional business. “Everybody here is a contractor,” Taylor explains, likening it to an artists' studio.

At any given time, Taylor can call on people such as Linda Millik and Tom Rafuse who can create all the buildings, trees and landscapes that populate a terrain of crisscrossing rail lines through tunnels and over bridges. “My workers aren't hobbyists, they're artists,” says Taylor.

The most expensive landscape cost $1.9 million. The landscapes include all the electrical equipment and rails to run trains, which can be controlled with an iPhone today. Taylor delivers the landscapes and installs them.

Taylor, who got his first train set at age 4, says he always had a passion for model railroading but it wasn't until the early 1990s that he left a career in software sales to import German-made model railroad train sets.

At a show in Atlanta in 1992, cable news giant CNN filmed his elaborate set built to display the trains, generating 50 phone calls to build similar landscapes. So Taylor shifted his business to buildings landscapes instead of importing train sets.

In 2009, Taylor moved the company from his native Michigan to Naples. “I moved down here to get away from the snow,” he says.

But Naples real estate proved to be too costly and employees there were unreliable, so he moved to less expensive space off Luckett Road in Fort Myers. “The cost of doing business in Collier is just so high,” Taylor says.

While Taylor says model railroads are still popular, he complains that the younger generation doesn't have the skills necessary to build train-set landscapes. “The whole magic in this is getting your hands dirty,” Taylor says. “The local hobby store is a thing of the past.”

But the landscapes by Master Model Railroad Consulting Services are sophisticated. Stanger designs the track system using computer-assisted design software and does the carpentry on which the landscape will be built. “There's a lot of creativity in this,” Taylor says. “We do it all in-house.”

Nostalgia drives customer sales. “A lot of them seemed to like them as children,” Taylor says.

Although the company has a one-year backlog of work, Taylor seems ambivalent about growing too big. “I'm on Social Security and I try not to take too much,” he says. Besides, he enjoys building the landscapes best of all. “I never wanted to be a businessman,” he smiles.

Follow Jean Gruss on Twitter @JeanGruss