Choo-Choo’s Trains was not a big shop, at least not the floor space that was open to clientele. Narrow, not more than twenty feet wide, some forty feet deep; it was a niche, a specialty store, but that didn’t mean Nabler’s ambitions weren’t grand. He believed his offerings carried broad appeal, that there was something about toy trains that bordered on the intrinsic. In Nabler’s experience, almost everyone was captivated by toy trains—men and women, despite the perception that the hobby was a largely male interest—even if they didn’t collect them or set up displays in their home. People were entranced by worlds replicated in miniature. Toy soldiers, dollhouses, model cars and boats and planes. They marveled at the minutiae, how upon examining a simple steam engine they would suddenly discover that inside the cab was an engineer sitting at the controls, or a mom and her son sitting at a table in the window of a passenger train’s dining car, sharing an ice-cream sundae.

And what set toy trains apart from so many other miniatures was that they moved. And as if that weren’t enough, they made sounds. Once those wheels started turning, the train went chuffchuffchuffchuff. Press a button, and a whistle would blow or a bell would clang. Woowoo! Dingding!

Who could resist such wonders? Nabler was confident that once word spread about his new shop—word of mouth was everything in this business—the train sets displayed so artfully on the shelves would be hard to keep in stock. Which was why Nabler had been preparing for several weeks to have sufficient stock before opening. Because Nabler was more than a straightforward seller and distributor of trains made by major manufacturers. No, everything that Nabler sold had been customized by him personally. While the front of the store was small, the back end was grandiose, deceptively so. From the street, no one could have guessed the space taken up by Nabler’s workshop, the place where all the magic happened. It was there that Nabler had been constructing, with his own innovative techniques, an elaborate model railroad with mountains and tunnels and bridges and stations, and it was on these tracks that every train Nabler sold was put through its paces to make sure it met his particular, exacting standards.

He pulled out his pocket watch again. It was 9:29 a.m.

Nabler walked to the front door, waited for the second hand to make one more sweep of the face, then flipped the switch to bring the neon open sign to life and unlocked the door.