@feet posted:To sum it up this is becoming a rich man's hobby.
As has been said on here many times, it was never cheap, at least not the new stuff. Someone pointed out that a ZW in the late 60's was the equivalent of around 600 bucks today, Mario's for memorial day had the ZW-1 for like 635 (not any more, that was when the regular price was like 750). Look at the price of 50's trains in the day at today's levels, it wasn't cheap. Lot of us got used to when PW stuff was to be found where you could buy a huge box for like 50 bucks, but that was because the market was depressed on the used side.
Heck, I just saw an athearn Caboose with sound in MRR, and HO scale one, and it was like 149 bucks with the sound module, they had an athearn hopper that was like 45 bucks (MSRP, I understand, but still).
