@Roundhouse Bill posted:The problem with using eBay as a price guide for a boxed set is that there might be only a few sold every year. Boxed sets are not as common as individual pieces. There the 1912 TM Guide is good, but it is 8 years old and values have slipped for most Flyer stuff. Still the most current.
The OP said that his neighbour had the trains in a box in his attic. It may be an original box or just any old box with it all stuffed inside. Even so, if the individual items have original boxes you can still use eBay to get a pretty good approximation of where all of it will sit price wise. Even the outer set boxes don’t seem to hit big $’s from what I have seen.
Price guides are exactly that, a guide, not a benchmark to give accurate values, there are too many variables to take into consideration. I find them more useful to know what was produced and when.
To me I suspect the compilers of guides, not just for trains, use them to help drive up artificially the prices of items to let people believe they have things of high value and when they try to sell them, they then get disappointed when they are told they are worth a lot less. I suspect over the next 2-5 years the glut of trains will drive prices down further, it will be interesting to see by how much.
