Quite possibly the saddest post I have ever seen.
I agree :-(
Deja vu. I dealt with a similar situation about 30 years ago. A guy had built his dream layout in his loft/attic, just after the war. This was at a time when most British 00 was toy trains, with scale in infancy. He had hand laid all his track, bought quite a lot of toy trains and painstakingly converted them to scale. That was fine until he could no longer climb into the loft. Years later, he paid a couple of guys to remove the layout and bring it downstairs. They just hacked it into pieces small enough to carry through the loft hatch. He heard about me, because I was into 'toy trains', and asked if I wanted it. I could see that it was well beyond rebuilding, but didn't tell him that, so I took it, and kept it until after he died. The locos and cars were almost worthless - to the train collectors, they were not original. To the scale guys, they were just toys. The US equivalent would be post war Lionel with wheels, valve gear and couplers ripped off, replaced with scale items and converted to two rail.
Always sad to see the end of someone else's dream.
Graeme
