I have been picking up pieces of Very Nice Postwar products for my layout for the past 2 years now,and most of it,at prices that could not be thought of before the economic collapse of 2008.
Besides a lot of postwar and prewar product seeing daylight for the first time in 30-40 years,due to the passing on of collectors,or health problems that either prevent them from enjoying their layouts,or being shipped off to assisted living homes where there is no room for a layout.
Alot of these gentlemen want to pass on their collections to their sons and daughters,but the families often have NO interest in the trains at all, or are forced to sell them off to help pay for the costs of assisted living homes and unreal health care costs.
It is sad that this is going on,but it has made more product available at lower prices,due to this happening to multiple families at the same time.Remember,Lionel and American Flyer sold MILLIONS of these trains,and due to their unreal craftsmanship and quality,it seems like MILLIONS of them are still around!!
Also,many people who ran postwar trains before the Command Control trains became available,selling off their postwar and prewar items to help pay for New,high priced new products they want to buy once the DCS or Legacy bug bites them.
I have been a conventional holdout,despite all of the buzz going on about the new stuff.To me,the newer trains just don't have that"magic" to me that postwar and prewar trains somehow seem to have. I can work on my older stuff and fix it if something goes wrong or just wears out,and the postwar trains make their own LOUD Clickity-Clack Sounds,whether you want them to or not.
With the newer trains,most people I know that run MTH or Legacy trains are either sending them in for warranty work,or taking them to authorized repair centers because of one problem or another.To me,it seems these new trains look and perform best at slow speeds,and I really like to "HIGHBALL" my stuff,and I am not impressed with the new trains performance at higher speeds.
And while I too am impressed by the sounds and new fan driven smoke units on the new trains,I am not impressed enough or financially well off enough to spend 2 house payments on a single engine,that does basically the same things my postwar trains do.If I retro fit one of the new smoke units into one of my postwar trains,now that would be cool,but probably not as fun as getting that postwar smoke unit heated up,and dropping in those wonderful smoke pellets that have that feature that new ones don't:They even SMELL like a Lionel train!!!
I bought a fantastic set of Santa Fe's for $250.00 6 months ago,and 10 years ago they would have sold for $450-$600 on the bay.I have noticed the downward trend for sometime now,but I know other guys have too,and that is what is keeping the trains from selling for even less than they do,because as several guys on this thread have stated,it is a great time to be an operator,and not have to pre order your trains and wait forever for them finally to be delivered and running on your layout.
Don't take me wrong,command control and new features have injected new life into a dying hobby,and probably saved it from being a thing of the past.
But for me,my new layout will have 1 line of 5 running at 18 Volts constantly,the others are for me to enjoy my beloved prewar and postwar trains,I just want to be able to run new stuff if friends come over,and to maybe buy a few new ones used, and explore the features of any new product coming out.
And I don't want to totally be ignorant about the new trains,just because I'm an old fart that likes to drop smoke pellets down the stack,and am turned on by the sound of a loud,buzzing e-unit.
To me,that's still where the magic of Lionel trains is at!!!And the lower prices are just a bonus,allowing me also to obtain nice examples of items that I never could afford before the prices started going down.
