Hello gentlemen: It is Sunday (midday) here "down-under", and I am just getting around to replying to all of your inquiries.
Firstly, thank you all for the great response to my post, really put a smile on my face this morning. OK, now down to business:
ChiTown Steve & harmonyards: "O" gauge trains are almost non-existent here in Australia. There was an effort to get Australian boys interested in 3 rail "O" gauge back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, with "Hornby" from England, and our own manufacturer "Ferris", but they died a natural death. I cannot ever remember hearing about Lionel, or Ives, or American Flyer trains growing up here in the 1950's and 60's.
There are no hobby shops anywhere in Australia that carry "O" gauge loco's, passenger cars, or freight cars, the best we have is a store in Melbourne (Victoria) that sells some "O" gauge "Woodland Scenics" products (bought a couple of 2% rises from them recently). Anything I want in "O" gauge must come from the States, or from Europe (Switzerland).
There is no one I am aware of that is an agent or a service repairer, or carries any spare parts for Lionel, MTH, Atlas, or Williams by Bachmann.....we are all on our own here!! Everything has to come from you guys!!!
In the matter of finding someone else here who has "O" gauge trains, and trying to combine an order, it doesn't really make that much difference to the cost, as it is calculated by weight.....cause everything gets flown-in to Australia from the rest of the world. Only things that get transported on boats is stuff that comes from Asia/China.....say no more!!!! To us Australians, weight is everything!!!!
rattler21: I found their listing on Global eBay, and it was not an auction, but a "buy it now". I sat on the listing for about a week, and noticed there were a couple of other people watching this same loco. I did as much research as I could on this MTH model, and was fairly convinced it did not come with any "inherent" manufacturer problems (unlike some of the early MTH RailKing Diesel loco's I also have in my collection).
Trainz had this loco listed for $307.52 US ($420.66 Aus) and this was well within my budget. The cost to ship it out to me here in Queensland, Australia (Gold Coast to be exact...Google it!!) was $98.64 US ($134.93 Aus), and this was a bit of a deciding factor.
Added to the bill was the "all important" eBay import duty of 10% on the loco and the shipping, as a total.....go figure, how can someone add a tax to a postage charge that already has the tax component built-in to it????? And to make matters worse, we Australians don't have to pay any import/sales tax on second-hand goods, if their value is under $1,000.00 Australian dollars!!!!! Sorry for the rant.
Anyway, in the end it still was a good deal, especially now, as it is fully operational, and I don't have to spend anything on it to get it up and running.
Don Winslow: I have included a couple of photos of the Buco track system, and how I can make my own sections of track using the spare parts that were, until just this year, available from a specialist hobby shop in Switzerland. They had purchased all of the left-over track stock from the Buco company when it went into liquidation, firstly in 1957, and again in the late 1960's and 1970's. I hope you enjoy.
