Mike James
The Independent
RUSSELL —
Locals had a saying for years: If you can’t get it at Rail City, you don’t need it.
The homeowner with a leaky faucet stopped by for washers. The shadetree mechanic dropped in to buy wrenches. The guy who puttered around in his basement workshop went to Rail City for nuts and bolts. The backyard gardener bought seeds there.
Children could even get a pair of skates at Rail City, the kind that strap to your sneakers.
Since 1993, customers often had the pleasure of watching a model train set wind its way around the store on a track suspended from the ceiling.
All that is coming to an end. The store is closing its doors for good at the end of July, said owner Scott Darling.
“It’s mainly the economy,” he said, sitting near the checkout counter at the heart of the store on Belfonte Street. Big-box stores have siphoned off much of his business. He also recently found himself in a precarious position after his stepfather, who owned the building, died a month ago.
The building has to be sold for estate purposes and Darling can’t afford to buy it. He had been watching his bottom line sink into the red for quite some time, so he made the difficult decision to close the store. The economic downturn made it final.
“I had planned to retire here. It’s the only job I ever had where I didn’t hate to go to work,” said Darling, who bought the business about six years ago after working in construction.
The store had been losing money. Darling coaxed it to the break-even point but never really made a comfortable profit. He tried his best with the old formula familiar to anyone who patronizes an old-time, locally owned hardware emporium: fast friendly service and staffers who know hardware and how to fix things.
That’s the way it’s always been at Rail City, according to former owner Bill Lanham, who continues to work part time for Darling and greets customers by name when they walk in the door.
He had owned and operated the store since 1974. There has been a hardware store on the spot, two doors down from the city fire station, since at least the 1930s, when a man named George Collins bought the building that had housed Russell Hardware and tacked up his shingle renaming it.
The store is situated where loafers on the bench outside can look to their left and see all the way down Belfonte Street, or straight ahead down Ferry Street to where it bends right and dips under the CSX overpass.
The front part of the store was damaged by a fire and rebuilt in 1977. The rear of the building was once a blacksmith shop.
In its heyday, Rail City’s customer base drew from Flatwoods, Worthington, Raceland and Ironton in addition to Russell.
If you go in now, you’ll see shelves that are starting to look thin, as longtime customers and bargain hunters snap up remaining merchandise at 20 percent off. Other than that, it retains the look of an old-fashioned hardware store: polished brass Toledo scale from the 1930s to weigh nails and seed by the pound, bins of screws and racks of springs, a battered blue work desk, bulk seed in barrels and glass jars.
The walls are a hodgepodge of vintage tools, railroad memorabilia and oddments like a century-old display for pins and needles, once a merchandising tool and now a dusty curiosity.
Suspended from the ceiling is a large-scale model railroad layout, complete with bridges and tunnels and locomotives hauling freight around the store, two feet above the heads of patrons.
It was engineered by Lanham’s friend, Lawrence Jancsek, who recalls the store as a hardware mainstay.
“When I came here in 1982, the first person I met was Bill Lanham,” said Jancsek, who worked with industrial air-handling systems. “When I needed extra materials, I sent a driver to Rail City,” he said.
“You could get anything there made by old-time companies. Things like apple peelers. They had them. Hurricane lamps. They had them,” Jancsek said.
Lanham invited Jancsek to his church, Mead Memorial United Methodist, and Jancsek has attended since. They became fast friends and still deliver Meals on Wheels together.
Jancsek designed the overhead layout in 1993 and also installed the billboard-sized, light-up sign out front that depicts two massive steam locomotives thundering by.
They run the trains for children who come in the store, like Isaac Stump, 8, who visited with his uncle, Greg Campbell of Pedro.
Campbell was looking for brass screws he said he can’t find at big stores. “This is the one place I could always come and get things the other stores wouldn’t carry,” he said.
With its grab-bag inventory of parts, Rail City could supply items other stores had long discontinued, he said.
It was a store where you can talk to the staff about your fixit problem and get practical advice, said Bill Michelson of Barboursville. Michelson worked at the Raceland Car Shops, so the railroad atmosphere appeals to him.
But atmosphere doesn’t pay the bills in a modern economy. Selling lots of merchandise does. And Michelson acknowledges that even guys like him who appreciate the hometown feel of Rail City tend to take most of their business to the big box.
And so Rail City will go the way of the steam locomotive and the roller-skate key.
“It’s the way of the world,” he said.
MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2652.
