I really seem at odds with so many toy train enthusiasts.
Yes, I had Lionels as a boy, in the 1950s. Tubular track. Had some Super O when I sold everything and left toy trains.
I have zero desire to reacquire any of that stuff! Even back then I just wanted more realistic trains. I hungered after the beautiful models advertised in the magazines. Overland stuff and Walthers scale passenger cars. Of course I could afford none of it on a kid's allowance!
No conventional running, no tubular track, no postwar stuff for me. Just doesn't interest me. Rather perplexes me that so many people love this stuff. Now we see a resurgence of tinplate . . . with sound no less???
Ah, well. Excuse me. I don't much like the Mona Lisa either. Think I'd wrap fish in it! 
So you can appreciate my perplexity when I found the nostalgia guys paying as much for Lionel Budd cars from the 50s as I paid for this . . .
My experience with the used market is usually trying to buy a 3-rd Rail item, not some 1955 Lionel locomotive. It's just an entirely different mentality. Probably all old hat to most here but I am only recently returned to the toy train scene and it was really a surprise to me.
I should hve anticipated it. About ten years ago I visited some long-time friends of my late wife. They had a basement full of mostly new Lionel stuff. They wouldn't even take it out of the boxes!! "It hurts resale values!," they told me.
