Interesting post Chris, thanks. As someone in my late 70's, I've not given much thought to the 'collector' market in a quite a few years. I had a retail hobby shop back in the late 1980's for about 6 years and saw what I perceived as the demise of the postwar and MPC market as MTH became a real force in the game and pushed Lionel into finally producing more than just repaints of their 1950s designs. MTH also began producing more scale offerings and their DCS control system had many more features than Lionel's TMCC.
As my generation has begun to 'age out', the postwar market has taken quite a hit as many quality PW collections came onto the marketplace which drastically lowered the demand and prices on anything less than Excellent condition PW pieces. The common VG items are almost hard to give away these days as there is so much product out there with less new people coming into the hobby. One of the primary driving forces with postwar Lionel (and Gilbert Flyer) is the nostalgia factor of folks my age who had them as kids. How do you younger fellas perceive toy trains from the late 1940s through 1969 or so? As antiques perhaps?
It is good to see you younger fellas coming in and bringing innovative ideas like these video groups and posts like this one. I will be the first to admit complete ignorance as to what will become 'collectible' as we move forward. :-)
Personally, which set will become collectible is beyond my scope of expertise now - I like the Dreyfus but will likely be gone before these modern sets become truly collectible!
