About Us

In the early 1970's in a small town in Hawthorne, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, was born a general hardware store and locksmith shop known as Great West Hardware. In the 1980's the store began to expand to offer more products and services and soon outgrew its locations. It slowly re-located to bigger stores further south along Hawthorne boulevard. 

As time passed we saw ourselves running across the street to a local hobby store and buying model trains from them for our clients. We decided in the 1990's to slowly convert our store completely to a model train store due to high demand from our clients. Word spread around the Los Angeles area of our specialty and expertise in the model train business. At the same time, the train industry moved from just the Lionel train set era to hundreds of different scale models, manufacturers, myriad of accessories, and thousands of new products. 

Eventually everyone around the neighborhood knew of our reputation of the greatest selection of train models at the best prices. Then in 2002 we started our mail order expansion and more advanced software systems to track our inventory, our customer base, our shipping methods, and our contacts around the world to greatly improve our service to our clients. Our well-established network of vendors allows us to supply our clients with one of the largest ready to ship inventories in the country. 

In Jan., 2007 we started another ambitiious expansion of our capacity by adding more space to our store and pursuing other store, office, & shipping locations. We are constantly upgrading and expanding our capabilities to better serve our clients and continue to look forward to serving the model train community.