There was a single man (I think) who died over two years ago who lived near me. I never knew about him or knew him, I just found ads for his train collection in the Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist over a year ago. I don't know much about it other than the sister and her husband are selling everything off.
However they are not doing as well as hoped. They apparently went through all the auction sites and pricing guides and priced everything else according to retail secondary values. Like how much a used LGB engine would cost at your local hobby shop. I believe they said that with their pricing, they arrived at a total near $79,000 or $89,000 for everything.
They weren't willing to sell stuff to let it go cheap.
The amount of stuff was enormous. I went to the home soon after it was all offered up. I ended up buying nothing due to the pricing.
A full 12x10 bedroom packed with nothing but G scale stuff, walls covered in trains, boxed items stacked hugely high.
Another room like that for O-scale stuff. A good sized layout in the basement. The layout is Gargraves track and is pretty nice. However they want 3000 just for the layout including the benchwork. No one has bought it. And on top of that, used benchwork appears to be pretty worthless, most people who buy a layout that has no scenery probably want the track more than anything else. The layout had very little scenery done to it.
There was a good sized N scale layout that also was sold off, but they accidentally under priced that one and sold the track (all kato I believe) for 300 dollars for a huge amount of track. Must have been 100-200 nice N scale engines but all were priced like 80-90 percent of new or used NOS retail. I only wished I had nabbed the track. The benchwork was still in place in the basement.
There also was a huge outdoor raised bench G-scale setup. I believe they let the track go for a fairly decent price but it was all soldered together and quite weathered from being outside and exposed to the inland Northwest elements. Would be worth it but you would need to put a good amount of labor into restoring/using the track.
My train shop friend told me how he went there and attempted to offer them a decent deal for a large amount of N gauge stuff, they weren't willing to part with it. He even explained to them that he has to resell it and make a profit. I always figured pawn shop pricing if you are going to attempt to have a shop buy you out which to me means that the pawn shop/train shop is going to resell used stuff at roughly 50-60 percent of "ebay sold item" pricing So the train shop is going to offer you like 25-30 percent of "ebay sold item" pricing but these people just weren't willing to let it all go.
They also refused to auction the stuff off. They said they would rather sell it slowly and keep the higher profits.
So they keep paying the mortgage on a rather expensive home and keep nickle and diming the collection at the 2 small train shows each year.
My point, I would present realistic expectations on what the executors of the wills should expect to get for your stuff. Just because the original price ticket on the box of some lovely train engine says $139.00 doesn't mean that you should expect to get $130 dollars quickly. You want to unload that engine quickly, sell it for $35-45 dollars. You want to wait a while but not too long? Sell it for $50-$75 dollars. You want to wait a long time, sell it for $130.