Years ago as a kid in the mid-1990s my dad and I would scan the newspaper classifieds for train stuff and he would take me to purchase N-Scale things we found, because I liked N-Scale.
I bought a large lot from a guy who had owned a hobby shop in the 1970s and had it in his basement much like that.
The cardboard was almost universally ruined -- you had to remove the boxes from things because the mildew/mold made them stink something awful. Even a number of large spools of wire had to be scrapped for that same reason, it smelled terrible and somehow it never went away.
The plastic and metal were fine, including Atlas nickel-plated track, etc., and I got a lot of good track pieces, switches, etc. But the boxes were junk after 20+ years in a damp basement.
