His train shop is closing, but Wiley Purkey's moving on, not out, changing plans, not giving up.

If Sykesville had a basketball team, Wiley Purkey probably would have coached it at some point. You might know him as proprietor of Purkey’s Toy Trains on Main Street, but until his retirement from community service in 2003, Wiley was involved in so many town activities, you might wonder if he employed a team of clones.

Town Councilman, Director of the Gatehouse Museum, President of Sykesville Improvement Association, and member of just about every committee you can imagine. He’s consulted on historic renovations, helped with a book on the town, built things, run things, restored things. If something good happened to Sykesville in the past couple decades, you can be pretty sure Wiley Purkey was involved.

He even lived on Main Street 20 years, renovating the historic building beside E. W. Beck’s restaurant, before deciding he needed space to grow things. So now he’s got a landscaping business and an acre by Liberty Reservoir with his wife, Claudia.

No More Toy Trains for Main Street

But this isn’t about Wiley the reluctant politician, the committee member, historian, preservation artist, gardener, or basketball coach. (Besides, Wiley can’t even play basketball.) It’s about Wiley the Main Street businessman, which is something that, after 22 years, he is no more.

Purkey’s Toy Trains is closing. Trains are going cheap. Shelves are going bare. Soon the platform and tracks and trains, the odd little rubber duck who rode the rails and cracked up countless little boys and girls, the sound of train whistles, the smell of train smoke, the big old cash register and vintage toy robots, the sense of excitement and childhood and Christmas, the whole world inside his train shop will vanish out the door in bargain hunters’ boxes until Wiley drags out the last of it himself, leaving behind two empty buildings, a pair of dark storefronts, two decades of memories, and one less good reason to come to Main Street Sykesville.

From Main Street Ellicott City to Main Street Sykesville

Wiley grew up in Ellicott City, lived on Main Street, then lived a few years on what he describes as a “scientific art commune” in Woodstock, Maryland, and came to Sykesville in the mid-eighties at a time when the town was near dead, Baldwin’s was a big storage bin, the town house was a rundown disgrace covered in plastic siding, and Main Street was a sleepy, empty mess.

Soon after arriving, he and his friend, former Town Council President Mark Rychwalksi, opened Craftsman Art Company at 7602 Main Street. Mark would eventually leave the business and Wiley would gradually make the transition from framing to trains and open Purkey’s Toy Trains in 2000.

“Trains are something I’ve always been interested in since I was three or four years old,” he says. “Anything that moves and is big and noisy and scary like that, it’s exciting. I remember pushing trains around on tracks that didn’t fit and pulling trains by strings. A lot of what I had as a child were trains bought by my mother at rummage sales. A box full of trains for a dollar, and nothing fit together and she’d buy three or four of these and over time I could put sets together.

“I lost interest when I was a teenager and didn’t pick it up again until after I was married. So I went through a big phase where I had no interest in the hobby whatsoever.”

But when the interest returned, it came back strong, just as his interest in framing waned. He eventually bought the place beside the frame shop, spent nearly $60,000 renovating and combining 7602 with 7604, closing the framing business, and proudly growing his train store to 4000 square feet in a pair of buildings built when the Civil War was a fresh memory, and Sykesville had rebuilt on the Carroll side of the river after the flood of 1868 washed away most of town.

Wiley’s as proud of what he did to 7604 Main Street as he is of the business he built there.

“It was built in 1878, and I had it gutted. Got rid of every bad idea that occurred to the building in the last hundred and twenty-five years and rebuilt it in a period-sensitive manner using what little bit of materials we could salvage.”

What Killed the Business?

Mainly, it’s the recession, of course, that did the business in, but he says it’s more than that, too.

He noticed things starting to go bad in the hobby in late ’05 or certainly ’06, gradually but steadily, and now he says, “It’s no longer profitable, and since it’s no longer profitable, it isn't much fun anymore.”

Train enthusiasts are getting older. The average age is early to mid-fifties, and kids are getting into trains at too slow a pace to replace the number getting out. Wiley thinks that maybe the kids aren’t interested because they don’t see much of the real thing anymore.

Even in a train town like Sykesville, where the centerpiece of the Main Street is a restaurant built from a restored train station, where train whistles howl at night, and just about everyone’s been delayed leaving town by a squealing string of rattling boxcars a hundred long, trains are more mundane and annoying than thrilling and romantic.

Passenger trains stopped visiting the station in 1949. Freight trains pass through but never unload, and most of us view the trains as something slowing us down on our way somewhere else. And for the kids, with the Wii, the Xbox, IPod, DVD, PC, webcam, and the rest, a train running the same route round and round the tracks on Christmas morning just might not be the thrill it used to be.

So there’s the competition with cooler toys, the loss of identification with real trains, the drop in the customer base that might have happened anyway, all that, coupled with the worst recession since the Great Depression.

As Wiley put it, “The toy train hobby can thrive in good times. But in difficult times, money’s going for mortgages and utilities. It’s not going for fluff. People are buying necessities; they’re not buying toy trains.”

And there’s also what he considers the general difficulty of running a business, especially retail, in Maryland.

“The business climate in Maryland is unfriendly, to say the least. Small businesses in Maryland have had at least five taxes increased in the past two years. And with all the things that are balanced on the backs of business owners, I don’t think you can make a living in retail in Maryland anymore, outside of the big-box mentality.

“I can’t afford to lose a hundred thousand dollars and go, ‘Oh well, I’ll just make it up next year.’”

He sees the problems as large and national, not something specific to Main Street Sykesville or main streets in general.

“I believe we’re in the process of morphing into an information-based society. Away from a commodity society. Information is only good if people are buying and selling commodities. Information, just for the sake of information, is valueless.

“Everybody’s social networking. Facebooking and Twittering about nothing. These people are not contributing. They’re not building. Billions of dollars are being wasted on people going, ‘Look at my stuff, look at my stuff.’ Everybody’s selling, and nobody’s buying. And that’s not sustainable.”

So What's Next?

But at the personal level, closing up shop isn’t all bad. It may even be good. He’s looking forward to sleeping late on Saturdays and spending the day with Claudia, who hasn’t seen much of him most Saturdays the past twenty-five years. He’s looking forward to getting back to oil painting and countless other artistic disciplines that kept him happy the first thirty or so years of his life. Yes, Wiley used to be an artist.

Plus, he’ll be consulting on architectural design, working on his gardens, building up his landscaping business (www.harvestfarmgardens.com), writing and blogging (www.wileypurkey.com), and generally living a more healthy, self-reliant lifestyle.

“Of course, I’m sad,” he says, “But I’m not sad for myself. What I’m sad about is how much I’m going to miss the parents bringing in their kids. Running the trains for the kids. Watching their excitement. Helping people build layouts. Helping people understand the hobby. How to make a tunnel, how to make their trains work when they don’t want to work.

“I’m going to miss all that interaction with the public. I’ve had interaction with the public almost every day of my life since 1971. I’m very sad about losing that.”

Wiley’s been through other phases in life. Painter, picture framer, museum director, council member, toy train entrepreneur. Now he’s a landscaper, and perhaps circling back to what he loves most of all.

“I find myself in the position where it’s hard to wake up without wanting to do something creative. It’s the kind of thing that burns like a fire inside, and for me one day it was gone. It was gone for fifteen years, and now it’s back.”

So maybe that’s how it ends. At least for the moment. Sykesville loses a businessman and a store that sold trains and made Main Street a better place. And Wiley becomes an artist again.

Related Articles:

Artist Without A Residence: She calls herself Sykesville's resident artist. She just donated 1800 prints to the town. But Trish Suder's losing her home and not sure where she's going.

Recession, Coincidence, and 7604 Main Street: A tale of artists, frame shops, pool halls, fire, and time.