Yeah, the situation is pretty well analyzed above. (It does seem, though, that we should have seen at least a temporary breathing room when trains were initially outsourced, doesn't it?. Maybe the prices just rose more slowly than they otherwise would have.)
My family couldn't afford the $79.50 that Gilbert asked for the North Coast Limited set that I desperately wanted in 1956. When it was reissued in 1992 the price was $795. And that didn't include track and transformer, as the 1956 offering had.
