Spring Creek Store

I'm David Zucker and this is my wife Debbie. We are the owners of Spring Creek Model Trains in Deschler, Nebraska. We started in the year 2000 and this had been a dream of mine for a long time. I think most who get into it, . . We started slow. Yeah. Steps at a time, one step at a time. We started by doing train shows all over the Midwest. Naturally, they're close shows to home and our circle has grown over the years. We're going clear to the East Coast on a pretty regular basis, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and going West we go as far as Salt Lake City right at the moment. And South, well yeah, we go to Texas quite a bit. When business grew, we obviously needed to either move to an actual storefront building or just stay small. And he didn't want to stay small. Yeah, I got a little carried away. So we got a hold of the building in 2009. And, well, one thing led to another and now it's full. After we got the building, then a couple years later, I'm not exactly sure of the dates, but Jeff moved home with his family and he took over the IT side of it, got his website going and helped us grow in that fashion. And then about three years later, then Mike was ready to make a change. And so he came home, brought all his family. So when I started, it was kind of my job to find locations where we could go and do our little train show setups. And so at first, And it gradually expanded. As we have grown, we are now to the point where we have six full-time employees. So Spring Creek Model Trains is a retail business, right? We're a retail business that sells model trains, all facets of model trains. We specialize in HO scale and then N scale. We do carry some other different scales, right? There's just the wide-ranging sizes of model trains that you can get yourself into. And then it's the whole gamut of what you can do with a hobby, right? So you can do it to where the trains are the actors in a play, right? I mean, that's kind of You can be really into building stuff, You can get into the electronics, right? It'so crazy right now with electronics. It's hard to keep up because you can do sound, right? Any locomotives are tooting their whistles, right? You can get down to the actual whistle that was on your locomotive that you're trying to model, make that sound come alive. We have manufacturers that are making smoke happen in all their locomotives. So it is so crazy on what can be done here at Spring Creek or what we're able to help our customers do. It is fun, right? When you get to talking with folks on what their interest is and how you can help expand their interest or just help them get to what they want to get to you, that's awesome, right? Because I don'think any of us here are quote-unquote experts of model trains, right? We've done it for a long time and we just try to help people learn from what we've made mistakes of in the past, maybe different directions on how to get to where they're trying to get. We have had some people come from a distance. We had a husband and wife come twice now from Cleveland, Ohio just to see us. And we've got a couple guys that come from Arkansas and St. Louis area that they just come to see the store. We have a guy that comes from Maine all the time. And we've had a couple of gentlemen from Australia. My dad used to count or write down the license plate variations that he would see during the weekend of the train show. And the most he noticed was 17 different states. The power of the internet has been very amazing to me. It has really expanded our business. It's very important to our business. It's just a necessary piece. I was talking with a gentleman earlier today and he was I said, well, I think it's part of a three-legged stool. So for us So we have to have our Brick and Mortar. Then for the other two, of course, is one of the websites. You have to have that. Without any commerce website, I'm not sure how any retail business that is. Looking to be more than, support more than just the owner can survive by foot traffic. So the web presence is key on how this stuff is out there. It also helps us turn over. And then of course, the third leg of that would be the train shows that my dad done. Their work for the last 20 years, 20 some years, going out and meeting those people and getting to know them and cultivating relationships is invaluable. It really is. Well, the reason we're in Deshle, Nebraska is this is where I grew up. And I'm very comfortable living here. My love of trains actually started right here in Deshle. Years and years ago, everybody should remember we had a Rock Island branch behind. My mom always said she knew where I was whenever she heard the train whistle. I got on my bike and I rode down and it was the only time I never got in trouble for being late for supper. We actually looked at moving to Omaha one time and we get invited to move to a lot of different places people want us to come. Again, I feel comfortable here. It's a great place for grandkids to grow up. I couldn't see us being anywhere else. One of the things we tell customers when they're Well, But you live in Fort Worth. How long does that take to get 30 miles? Oh, I said, well, this is 30 minutes, 30 miles, 30 minutes, one stop sign from there to here. That's it. And they're like, that's this can't be to have the kids involved, not just Mike and Jeff and their wives who do any n They go to train shows for us. They work our local train show when we put that on. But our two oldest granddaughters, they're involved also. And then the younger boys, they're also part of it. It was like a dream, I don't know, Dave and I didn't have the knowledge to make any of that happen. So it's just huge to be able to do what we're doing. And we're blessed. Yeah, we certainly are. It was just a passion. It was pretty hard to wear me out when I would come to train shows and model trains.