I've been having a dickens of a time trying to find wholesale suppliers to stock our gift shop. I found one supplier that offers die cast toy trains. We also have a supply of pins and stickers with our museum logo. We are also running through a supply of mugs that feature different pieces of our equipment. And of course tons of old magazines that we practically give away. But I haven't found a good supplier for engineers hats, wooden whistles, or Thomas the Tank engine toys.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

-Otto-

We have successfully worked with Charles Products for 40 years.

http://charlesproducts.com/products/train.html

Wesley

Please take a look at our products: http://www.phoebesnowco.com

We have discounts available for museums and tourist railroads. Our current gift shop customers find that our coffees, bake mixes and other products tend to help create/increase sales to people who are casually interested in railroads and want to buy something, but aren't interested in books, models or kid's stuff.

Feel free to contact me for more information.

Vendors set up at ATRRM conventions, and going there to meet them F2F and build a relationship would do you a lot of good........ November in Savannah, so you can't complain about the cold weather this time. Late hurricanes are actually fun and exciting.

Here are the main vendors we use:
Charles Products, already mentioned, about 2/3 of the stuff in our store comes from them.
Wow Toys (mainly for their Classic Train Set series).
Daylight Sales (stock and custom Tees and mugs).
Holgate Toy (mainly for their Mr. Rogers trolleys).

We are often spammed by vendors hawking wares. The email address on our website is obfuscated and immune to robots, so they clearly pay a human to search the web all day. I wouldn't recommend any of them, obviously.

My favorite is the one who wants us to sell Ansel Adams art books.

I haven't been spammed by the 4 vendors that I listed. Wow Toys though does have a sales rep drop by the museum once or twice a year, often giving us free samples of their latest train related toys.

For the past 16 years I've dragged my kids to 2-3 museums a year. A summer project was cleaning out a toy room in the house that had collected a lot of stuff, including what we had picked up over the years, so I'm speaking as a recent "customer" of kids products at railroad museums.

One piece we picked up at the height of the "Wooden Thomas trains" era, was a custom box car painted in one of the museum's home road schemes. I traced the manufacture of this car to this small US business:

https://www.woodentrain.com/

I've only ever seen Whittle Shortline trains at one other tourist RR (Strasburg). They were never repeated at the original discovery location.

In the following years, we spent more than a couple hundred buck's on their real world trains that allowed us to get a few more years out of investment of Thomas wooden track.

I see now they are introducing a double stack car and others.

I have no interest in this company, but figured I'd pass along my experience.

Bob

ATRRM has a email list on retail issues. I've subscribed but I only get the monthly list of rules, not sure if the rest is getting blocked or if there isn't anything going on there.
And of course I have to suggest you look at The Little Yellow Trolley Car
(http://www.thelittleyellowtrolleycar.com), the true illustrated children's story of Shelburne Falls (Massachusetts) and Colrain Street Railway No. 10. It is really the story of many trolley cars at trolley museums (active trolley, chicken coop, restoration). The usual disclaimers do not apply in this case.

In the bigger museum store world there is an association that is devoted to the issues of running and managing retail stores at museums: Museum Store Association