The Train Shack

Step around the corner onto Hollywood Way and look for a modest storefront that has kept a very analog hobby alive for four decades: the Train Shack. Before Burbank was a studio town, it was a rail town. A Southern Pacific freight line ran along a right-of-way just south of here — the same corridor you'll walk back on at the end of this tour — and the Pacific Electric's electric Red Cars once carried Valley commuters along interurban lines. Model railroading keeps that history in miniature, and this shop has been its Burbank home since 1985.

The Train Shack started the way a lot of Magnolia Park businesses did — one person's obsession turned into a storefront. Gary Keck rediscovered his boyhood love of trains as an adult, began selling to fellow hobbyists at his train club, and eventually opened a shop in a building so plain it looked like a shack. The name stuck. Look through the window at the layouts — HO scale, N scale, brass locomotives, tiny hand-painted scenery. After Gary retired, his children took over, making this a second-generation family business, and they added custom layout-building for collectors who want a whole world on a tabletop.

There's something fitting about a model-train store surviving here. This is a street that runs on craft and patience — people who make things by hand, whether it's a wedding cake, a movie costume, or a scale-model rail yard wired to actually run. It's easy to walk past a hobby shop. But step inside for a minute if trains tug at you at all; places like this are getting rare. When you're ready, we'll cross back toward Magnolia and head for a record store that's been fighting the digital tide since the nineties.