Model railroaders convene each year to celebrate their hobby. But this year they’re wondering about the impact of tariffs on the foreign companies that make a lot of the products they collect.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The Trump administration’s tariffs have had broad effects on the economy. They’ve even created uncertainty for the niche industry of model railroading. Jeff Lunden reports.
JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: The Railroad Hobby Show in West Springfield, Massachusetts, fills four buildings and attracts about 25,000 hobbyists, manufacturers and retailers a year. It isn’t a toy train show. It’s geared towards people who model highly detailed replicas of real trains, and retail prices are going up.
TOM DAVEY: Is that going to be cash or card?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Cash.
DAVEY: One-twenty-four seventy-three, please.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: All right.
LUNDEN: Tom Davey is a retired banker from Georgia who runs Southeast Hobbies, which had a large model railroad store at the show, where he sells these expensive trains and accessories.
DAVEY: I have a big trailer and a big pickup truck to pull all this inventory around the country. We do about 20 shows a year.
LUNDEN: It’s a mom-and-pop operation. Tom and his wife, Carol Davey, run it. The same can be said about many of the companies that make the products the retailers sell. They design their models in the U.S. and have them built overseas. There were displays all over the show with samples of new models, but a lot of these small companies are feeling economic stress.
JOHN SHERIDAN: It’s been difficult because obviously we’re absorbing the tariff, not China or anything else.
LUNDEN: John Sheridan is a product designer for Roka Prototype Models, which is a two-man operation. The cars, which cost as much as $95, are built in China. And Sheridan admits that the tariffs, which have fluctuated from 10% to 145%, threaten a business that already has a slim profit margin.
SHERIDAN: It’s like, people ask – was asking us when it was getting really bad. It’s like, what’s the price of the car? And we’re like, well, it depends on what the tariff is.
LUNDEN: Jason Shron of Rapido Trains told me over Zoom, there’s a couple of reasons his models are made in China.
JASON SHRON: One is cost of production, but the other reason is the global expertise of the model industry is not only based in China, it’s based in one city in southern China called Dongguan. It takes about eight hours to assemble and decorate one of our locomotives.
LUNDEN: Shron’s company is located near Toronto, but he changed his business model and opened an American branch so his customers in the States pay the Canadian tariff but avoid the Chinese one. Other companies are shifting manufacturing to Vietnam, which currently has a lower tariff than China. Stacey Walthers Naffah is president of a 94-year-old family-owned company that is a manufacturer, distributor and retailer.
STACEY WALTHERS NAFFAH: This entire industry is a niche business, and then inside of it, it’s completely made up of small businesses. We really honestly just think that we should be excluded from it because we’re, like, a rounding error.
(SOUNDBITE OF MODEL TRAIN RUNNING)
LUNDEN: And Naffah’s part of a hobby industry coalition, which is lobbying to get exemptions to the tariffs.
For NPR News, I’m Jeff Lunden in West Springfield, Massachusetts.
(SOUNDBITE OF REVERIE SONG, “GIVE IT TIME”)
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