Lets see your best score on craigslist or estate sales

I do not do CL and the rare estate  attendance was for LPs. my best score was at the Strasburg show a couple of years ago: a boxcar kit painted/lettered for the Bridgeport & Boston RR.

 

I have never found anything at an estate sale that wasn't severely over priced.  However there was a time i was trying to find some 072 track back in the day for a new circle on my old layout.  Ran into some Lionel.  This person, at one time had plans for a huge layout in a separate bldg.  He had a healthy appetite for Lionel and he had very, very good taste.

39 engines
356 pieces of rolling stock,
12 Lionel tractor/trailer units
1 flyer hudson set,
24 pieces of flyer track,
flyer roadbed,
o gauge silicon roadbed,
A bunch of thin cork roadbed striped for city street straights, curves, intersections, etc.
One ZW
1- 4090 xfmr
7 nice boxed accessories,
200+ pieces of O tubular track,
6 lighted lockons on blister packs
Other loose lockons
One switch track boxed
13 boxed OCS sections
Boxes of lead painted figures
A Lionel clock and other stuff I can't remember.

It was an all or nothing deal.
And the price was extremely attractive for what i thought were used trains.
Everything was boxed except the flyer stuff,  3 engines, the ZW, the track and roadbed.  I didn't open most of the boxes.  The stuff looked in good enough shape to me.

It took several trips to get all of it home.  After getting home and looking through it,  I realized almost everything was brand new instead of used, including the track.   The layout had never graduated from a couple of trains on a Christmas carpet layout.  I don't know where the flyer stuff was going to fit in his layout plans.  The only die cast vehicles were the tractor trailer units.  Looking back, some of the pieces and quantities didn't make sense but he probably wasn't finished buying stuff either.

That incident did severely dampen my buying power.  Very simply, I had no where to put new stuff or room on the layout to run trains.  But for a time, I did get to play with some stuff I would never have bought on my own.

The photo isn't the best but, I picked this 681 up at an estate sale in late May.  Condition was at least a C-8 and both the engine and tender came with original boxes.  And it was VERY reasonably priced to boot!

Curt

I killed it last year at a train estate auction.  Bought a lot of high end pieces at very reasonable prices.  Shipped many items home-I didn't have room in the truck for everything!

 

It was my once in a lifetime deal.

 

 

 

I personally haven't done much with Craigslist. Locally, most Lionel posts on Craigslist are WTBs by sellers/collectors. I search it once or twice a week anyway, but haven't hit.

I bought this little guy and another one in much nicer shape for $25:

 

 

A little prep work and a few coats with a rattle can netted this:

 

 

I've done much better on Craigs List buying Schwinn bicycles than I have Lionel or Marx trains though. I've put over 600 miles on one of them so far this year.

 

 

J White

 

looks great Joe! 

I paid $2 for this at an estate sale. It was in a toy box with random plastic toys.

Same here. No luck on trains at estate sales. But purchased at a estate, large collection of M1 Carbines at a steal. Sold 1 to purchase my Big Boy.

This is probably one of the the rarest things I've ever found responding to a craigslist ad a few years ago. 

 

 One of the extremely hard pieces of Lionel Plasticville to find, I ended up selling this for $1,200 on Ebay.....

 

John

No Scores but a friend of mine in the All Gauge Toy Train Association in San Diego, spent $3,000 on a rare estate, he said it is a lot of items of all varieties of manufacturers and Railroads. 

I always found the Lionel Plasticville to be cool just because of the history of it, but a ridiculous price premium over the standard packaged Plasticville.

Maybe this is a little off topic.The BEST scores are made on OGR Forum "For sale"…The guys here feel that we are all part of a team.They are willing to sell to you for less.They will stand behind the item they sell you.They want you to be happy.Get a bargain…give a bargain.Keep it in the family.Nick

I've had some very generous deals, and sometimes outright gifts, from hobby people met through internet forums including OGR. It was all part of the camaraderie of the hobby forums.

 

What started me in O-gauge in 1998 was a visit to our old hometown area back east where I looked up a former high-school friend of my long-deceased brother. He gifted to me a 1931 Lionel train which had originally belonged to my father and had been out of our family for about 35 years. We had given it to him back in the 1960's when we had the "better" HO trains. 

 

In 2010 I was checking an ad I had posted on Craigslist and happened to see "old trains for sale". I had no serious involvement in O-gauge at that time beyond running my dad's old train on a basic figure-8 layout. For $50 I got what turned out to be a Lionel #2175 outfit from 1951 with the classic Santa Fe warbonnet F3's. At that price I figured it would be cool just for a shelf display. But eventually I did get it running.

  

 

I thought I didn't have room for an O-gauge layout but now I have about 400 feet of track in operation for a multitude of old O-gauge trains acquired in just the last five years ...

 

There are many people out there who I should be writing Thank You letters to because they enabled me to get into the O-gauge side of the hobby.

Those warbonnets are a ridiculously good deal. We have a winner to this thread...

Craigslist New Hampshire. 3 of these G scale were $125.00 each brand new in the box.

 

Few weeks ago I acquired a GN 2-8-0 PS2 3v, Coal hopper, gondola, tanker, box car, caboose, small MTH house, Z750 transformer and 27 pieces of MTH track for $125.00. Engine only has 16 scale miles. This was on CL for 17 days.

 

 

about 2 years ago an estate sale yielded me some premiere MTH including a Canadian Pacific sd90, Russian Decapod, and a z4 challenger and about 25 Atlas boxcars and reefers. There were also some buildings in the mix as well. In Addition to my score several members of the TMB Model train club, N,L.O.E and the NJ Hirailers also participated. All in the sale raised over $20,000 by the clubs in addition to the $$$ raised from ebay sales

 

I've had tons of good luck with craigslist. I can't even think of it all off the top of my head.

 

Two come to mind. One was a pair of identical boxed Prewar Marx 3/16th scale sets, sold by Montgomery Wards with the black Canadian Pacific Jubilee. One set was missing the engine but otherwise both were complete, track transformer and all. Got them for $75. Why he had two of the same set I don't know.

 

The other was a postwar 2297WS....746 J freight set. Had everything that came with the set excluding the boxes. Even the empty bottle of smoke fluid. All the accessories with cars and affiliated cargo were present. It was all filthy but it cleaned up to beautiful shape. They only wanted $375....I was there in a heartbeat

 

Trevor

Ace that was great getting Dad's train back!

My first and to date, only estate sale I was alerted to by a co-worker who was contacted by one of his friends. Me and another friend, a 'postwar expert" went over there and came back with three boxes of somewhat rough-looking postwar equipment which we then split up at his place before heading home.

 

This was my half of the haul, after I cleaned/repaired the rolling stock, and found replacement shells/trim for the F3's.

 

 

The three boxcars on the end are by Kusan. They had missing and broken trucks, but I was able to find replacements so they're run-able.

 

Also this 236 Scout loco, shown as-received: 

 

...and after cleanup. Fortunately this one has seen little use, and ran like a champ even down to the smoke unit.

 

---PCJ

pretty nice haul

I don't have any photos but a couple of years ago a guy in my neighborhood was advertising K-Line track and trains on Craigslist for 110.00 and he didn't have pictures. I thought since the guy was very close by I would go check it out. I meet the guy at his house and he brings out a box and all I see is rusty 027 track.  I thought man I am wasting time here.  He takes the track off the top of the box and underneath is a six car set of new SF passenger cars and below that a set of brand new never run SF Alcos.  I about had a heart attack and then on top of that he had another box of track in like new condition.  That was my first and only score from Craigslist as there isn't much O gage here in So Cal.

 

 

 

 

This was my $300 Craigslist haul from a couple of months ago while working in Panama City,FL. 

 

 

 

Got a free layout from craigslist several years ago. All I had to do was tear it down and remove it. The owner passed away before he had a chance to wire it and run trains. Very sad.

I'm liking that Noma station that was included in this haul. They're really neat when they're working properly.