CANFIELD — Walking around the Canfield Train and Toy Show on Saturday, one can hardly be blamed for thinking it’s a man’s world.

The way Steve Belovics tells it, the train hobby comprises about 85% guys.

But you can find some ladies, and one in particular may know more about actual railroads than many of the collector fellas buying and selling models.

Looking out from her own booth at the Michael Kusalaba Event Center at the Canfield Fairgrounds, Shelly Colucci can put her hands on models of railroad track switches that are near exact replicas of the real-life ones her employer sells.

Colucci works for Pittsburgh-based L.B. Foster, selling steel, lubricants and other components for railroad track assemblies to train companies nationwide. She’s worked in the field for the past 33 years.

“It’s all I’ve done, since I was 17,” she said.

At one point, she ran the division of her company that manufactures and sells the components for switches and signals. Her husband, Chuck, has a lifelong love of trains, too. Some may recognize him as Canfield’s police chief.

“My dad had American Flyer but he wouldn’t let me play with them,” Chuck said. “He bought me HO and I had to kind of prove to him that I wouldn’t destroy them.”

He remembers when HO trains were as affordable as $80 for a set. Now some sets — even some individual cars — can go for $500.

He and Shelly now deal mostly in the MTH brand.

“There’s more Lionel around, but I really love (MTH’s) story, and the story of the guy behind it,” he said. “I just love their engines. The scale and the attention to detail is just so realistic. They’re also very easy to reach, and they stand behind their product.”

The Coluccis love that MTH provides high-quality replicas not only of big names like Norfolk Southern and CSX, but also smaller local and regional railroad lines, like Carload Express and Wheeling and Lake Erie Erie Railway Company.

Chuck remembers that he was able to ride a Carload Express train in Pittsburgh, then go and buy an MTH scale model of the same engine that pulled the train he had just ridden.

They have a large finished room in their basement full of train sets and displays, and Shelly said it helps maintain relationships with clients.

“I send them pictures of replicas of their trains that run on the tracks in our basement,” she said.

Their son, now 27, also got into the hobby when he was very young. He has his own large train room in his Florida home, and sending pictures and videos of their train sets and new acquisitions is one of the family’s favorite ways to keep in touch.

Saturday’s event was very much a family affair for many of those in attendance. Kacie Miller brought her son Jude, 5, and his brother along with the boys’ grandparents.

“Their grandpa has trains and he’s here looking for some pieces for the set and some landscape items, so we thought it would be fun to tag along,” she said.

Dennis Rose, 71, of Akron brought his grandson, Gryffin Podlogar, 5, of Hartville, to get him started in the hobby.

Rose has an old American Flyer set from the early 1950s that needs repairing, while Gryffin has a few smaller plastic cars. Saturday was all about getting him on track with some more serious pieces.

“We’re building this backwards, buying the cars first then we’ll get the tracks,” it’s really just about getting him out of the house and getting him interested.”

Gryffin picked out two Lionel 1469 O-gauge cars — a coal car and a Sunoco gasoline tanker.

Belovics, of Hinckley in Medina County, was there to sell some Lionel O-gauge cars for a friend of his wife’s, whose husband recently died, though Belovics himself is an American Flyer man.

“I had American Flyer as a kid, me and my brother,” he said. “We still have the same stuff we had as kids, and then we got into buying and collecting and now we have too much stuff.”

John Robinson of Monroeville, Pa., said a good show is defined by a few characteristics: variety, which Canfield’s show Saturday certainly had, and good deals.

“In the hobby, we like to say a good show is about good stuff cheap,” he said.

While some pieces on display Saturday had high price tags, and the weather may have kept some folks away, Robinson said that by any definition, Canfield’s show was a good one.