The story
Coined c. 1958 by David R. Sawyer of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) as a fanciful name for model railroad parts, perhaps originally as a proper noun. More general use presumably dates from the 1960s, as it is not found in the TMRC dictionaries of 1959 or 1960.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.