WILDWOOD – Holly Beach Train Company, opened in October 1994, is one of the very last model train stores in South Jersey. “I grew up in this building,” owner Larry Lillo told the Herald during a tour on a slow, freezing January afternoon. Lillo has spent decades sharing the joy of model trains with shoobies and locals who are curious enough to step outside their routines and into his hyper-niche store.
The shop was a barber shop run by Lillo’s father in the early 20th century, just a short time after his family moved to Cape May County from Italy. The upstairs served as the Lillo’s family home.
“Back then, you didn’t need a car,” Lillo said, referring to the Cape May Seashore Lines that serviced the entire peninsula and took riders to and from cities like Philadelphia and New York. His family did not purchase a vehicle until the last train line closed in 1958.
“Back then, everything was right here in town, grocery stores, clothing stores,” Lillo said.
When he was young, Pacific Avenue was Wildwood’s core shopping district. Today, it’s dead quiet in the winter, and many of the shops sit empty. A redevelopment zone, a partnership between the city, county and state, was established on Pacific Avenue in 2022 to help the street bounce back. But even as surrounding stores shuttered, Holly Beach Train Company chugged along.
The store is busiest around Christmas, but recent summers have been no slouch. Lillo said that because he owns the building, overhead costs are low. He is the store’s only employee. He mans the front counter from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every Tuesday to Saturday. Decades of shop ownership, and a tuned-in knowledge of what trains will and won’t sell, means he avoids the pitfall of overstocking that snares many niche, lower-volume stores.
Lillo attends model train expositions all over the globe and tells every train enthusiast he meets about his store. “People call me almost every single day from places all over the world to talk about trains,” Lillo said. If expo-goers come to Wildwood on vacation, they know where to visit.
Holly Beach Train Company sells new and used model engines, boxcars, scenery for villages and railways, maintenance items to keep aging locomotives in running shape, and hundreds of feet of track. Visitors will find massive “G” scale trains that are 1:25 the size of the real thing, tiny “S” scale models with proportions similar to Matchbox cars, plastic humans just a third of an inch in height, flocked plastic trees, and old rail signs.
All of his most popular items are custom models, commissioned by Lillo in small batches, of engines, boxcars, and passenger cars that once trafficked Cape May County.
The most popular is a replica of an old “Sellright” boxcar that sat abandoned on Oak Avenue for more than a decade. The Sellright car, bright white, promised “Another carload of the original Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer” with giant hand-painted lettering on the boxcar’s side.
Lillo said that custom models, like the Sellright car, fetch over 300 orders. These old locomotives, and the stations that housed them, remind Lillo of a bygone era in Wildwood. He has lived in the city through thick and thin but is thankful for a new wave of development that is slowly reviving the city’s languished streets.
“I was a code enforcement officer when I was with the Wildwood Fire Department, and some of the places I visited in the 1990s were truly terrible. I went to places that felt like a third-world country on the inside – but today, things are really looking up here in Wildwood,” he said. “People love this place, and folks from around the country want to remember it.”
Flooding, more common than ever in Wildwood, brings the occasional struggle. Hurricane Sandy brought over a foot of rainwater into the store.
“I stayed here and didn’t evacuate because I had to save the merchandise,” he said. “Good thing it was just rainwater!”
Today, the train store is Lillo’s main gig. He closed “Larry’s Laundromat,” just across the street, in 2005, and retired from a 25-year stint on the Wildwood Fire Department around the same time.
Holly Beach Train Company opened during a flash in model train popularity that lasted through the end of the 1990s. “When I opened this place, I imagined I would be playing with trains all day long,” he laughed as he took the Herald around the dense store.
Lillo said that the hobby is currently in a popularity slump, but a loyal group of train buyers keeps him afloat. “Hobbyists are still buying the real expensive stuff, like old metal engines that cost $2,000. But there aren’t as many new, younger fans coming into the hobby.”
But Lillo isn’t worried. He has seen the hobby spike, and recess, in mainstream attention since he first got into trains in the 1950s. The cost of entry is low; he said that new hobbyists can buy a Lionel starter set, with an old-school electrical transformer, for under $100. Much of the hobby’s fun comes from hand-painting and hand-crafting scenes for the trains. And that requires dedication and patience, not a huge pocketbook.
Mostly, Lillo said he is thankful for the huge community of model train lovers who have shared the joy of trains with him, and who have kept his store vital for so long. During his Herald interview, an American expat visiting from Germany came into the store to buy a new model train to take home.
Lillo was visibly excited when the customer left – the two chatted about their times in the military. Lillo told the Hearld after the man left: “He’s from the same town of Germany where I was stationed in the military. He’s here from Germany and is going to take a model train home with him. Can you believe it?”
Visit the Holly Beach Train Company at 4712 Pacific Ave., Wildwood. Contact the author, Collin Hall, at chall@cmcherald.com or 609-886-8600, ext. 156.
