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and the engines for $5. In comparison a car in 0 gauge will sometimes sell for $100 and engines can run in the thousands of dollars.
He is full of observations about his fellow collectors. “A person tends to buy trains of their childhood era, he said. “They’ll say ‘I want to buy a train like the one I once had, but my mom gave it away,’ or if they didn t get the train they wanted as children, it’s the train ‘I should have had, and that’s the train they want.”
The result of that is that “the newer trains are becoming more valuable, and the older ones aren’t increasing in value as fast, since the people who associate with them are dying out,” he said. “Amtrack models will be collector’s items some day.”
That means that those who associate the romance of trains with the sound of the steam whistle in the night are being replaced with those who know only diesel trains. Mr. Estes notes that steam train collectors aren’t interested in diesel trains “and visa versa.”
Another thing he has noticed is that many fine trains never come up for sale. “They get passed down through the generations like the family silver or grandfather’s watch,” he said.
Mr. Estes notes that Lionel- has made trains of varying quality. The set parents paid $16.95 for in the 50s was a bottom-of-the-line set, he said, even though that may have been a large investment for that family. “It’s still bottom-of-the-line,” he said. The top-of-the-line sets from that era cost over $100, he said, “and they’re still top-of-the-line.”
“Most of the difference is in the quality of the workmanship that went into manufacturing it,” he said. “In most cases the parts are not interchangeable.” He said the details of the top train sets made them “true scale models of the real thing.”
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