sg31 wrote:stewamax wrote:Charlottesquare wrote:Certain model trains can be more fruitful
As a child I had some O-gauge Bassett-Lowke locos and carriages on a largish (for a small boy) circular track almost the length of our garage.
Derailments were so common (bad track assembly) and stoppages almost as common (the electric motors were in the tenders, with an articulated driving rod linking to the loco) that I eventually disassembled the locos and gave the carriages to a church jumble sale.
DAMN! - what these in their original cardboard boxes) would have been worth now.
They would need to be in the original boxes and in as new condition to fetch top dollar. I had a lot of Corgi cars bought late 50's but as a child my greatest delight was in crashing the together. You can be assured they would be worth very little now but the fun I had as a child was priceless. I hope my nephews enjoyed them whem I passed them down 30 or so years ago.
Collecting is one thing, toys are completely different.
I have flirted with the idea of these as a business as there is a market in between, the tricky bit would be finding the stock, without people flocking to you, to sell to you, there would really be a lot of time spent looking.
I have always wanted to retire and have a secondhand model shop, there is even a decent size shop unit up for sale 150m from my house right now. I could open the sort of shop from my childhood where the trains whizzed around on a layout and I stood with my nose pressed to the window, but I suspect I would need to do it as a labour of love and live on my pensions as I doubt I would ever make much from the models- in fact model railways shops are closing down at a fair lick these days and the pricing of new trains etc is so high the entry cost for kids to the hobby must be enormous (£100-£200 for a loco) not helped by smaller houses just not having enough room (N gauge as the new OO)
However if I ever did open a shop I do at least have nearly £2,000 of stock to get going with though some of it I really would not want to sell- I have also amassed about £650 of secondhand meccano intending to refurb it in retirement and build some of the models I could only dream about as a child; the monster cranes , large motorised aeroplanes, big wheels etc. Just need to get rid of one of the kids to get their room as my current study/office/ bolt hole is really too small.