Burien’s Electric Train Shop is a model destination for enthusiasts

THE FLOWER-POTTED STRETCH of 152nd Street that makes up downtown Burien can have an idyllic, almost Mayberry-like feel. Apart from the omnipresent scent of baked goods from Grand Central Bakery and nearby Bakery Nouveau, a big part of what creates that effect is the existence of the Electric Train Shop.

The store’s facade looks like a shop from a movie set in the 1950s or, painted a faded rust-red, rather like an old train car itself. But in truth, the spot is not actually old at all. The Electric Train Shop landed at 625 S.W. 152nd St. in Burien in 2010, though before that, it was located in the West Seattle Junction for 14 years, and in Pioneer Square before that. Longtime residents will recall that the building where the train shop lives now had previous lives as the Highline Pharmacy, an auto shop and a church.

Its owner and proprietor is Scott Law, a longtime train enthusiast and collector who probably knows as much about the intricacies of model trains as anyone. His shop’s shelves and racks are full of the miniature pieces that make up a whole world — its buildings, trees, people and (of course) trains — like the workshop of a creator-god populating his own personal universe.

Train sets come in various scales, from the tiny Z scale to the far larger G scale size meant to be built in the backyard (the G is for Garden). For the delight of perusers, the shop features trains that run on overhead rails, trains on tables and even one on a rotating bicycle wheel that almost creates its own perpetual motion. Law’s stock runs the gamut from expensive antiques to ordinary train cars inexpensive enough for children to buy with their allowance.

“Kids get started early with trains,” Law says, laughing. “We lose them in the teenage years, but they always come back, and then they stay that way until they die.”

Train enthusiasts hide among us and, in their off hours, create entire worlds in miniature. (Also in Burien is a private model train club for Boeing employees that has existed in some form for roughly 40 years.)

Law’s customers are truly a devoted bunch, and if you think that a store that caters to such a rarefied subset of hobbyists would, in this day and age, do most of its business online, you would be incorrect.

”I don’t do any online stuff, really,” Law says, adding that much of his business involves dealing with vintage collections, and in the close-knit world of train enthusiasts, stores such as the Electric Train Shop are known by word-of-mouth, advertisements in old-fashioned print magazines, swap meets, conventions and train shows — in short, by the interfacing of humans who, inherently, love to hearken back to an older, more analog time when transportation ran on rails.

There is a surprising amount of paper in there as well, like old train timetables and back issues of enthusiast magazines, all punctiliously organized and lending the shop the distinguished scent of “vintageness” that one smells in libraries or antique stores.

The oldest piece in the shop is a tin train set more than 100 years old set in a glass counter, which sits just below an intricate model of a logging train rumbling through the Pacific Northwest countryside, lovingly crafted with every nut, bolt and chip of wood rendered in minute detail, a tiny piece of our past captured in the place it can, perhaps, be best appreciated.