I was watching this caboose on Ebay the other day. It was going for $42. on April 8th. The auction ended yesterday. It’s an Atlas, Ready To Run Extended Vision Caboose in the Chessie C&O Safety Slogan Orange. It went for an incredible $152.50.
The bidder that won this auction also won a second auction for another Chessie caboose at the price of $42.65.
Check It out
These people are crazy…Where are they when I place an item up for auction???
Bill
Yeah,Street price is usually around $19.00-22.00 for a Atlas caboose including the Chessie safety cabooses.
let me just say that I dont think its Idiotic or unbelievable. I am a C&O fan and Chessie fan. If I had that kind of disposable income then I would have been bidding on them as well. GIven that I had looked around to see if i could have found them somewhere else for cheaper. Still If thats what floats your boat then there ya go.
J.W.
And my wife gave me guff about a $26 Bowser caboose…!
I know what you mean. I’ve been only purchasing rolling stock, and have been outbid at times on items that I think the buyer hasn’t done his/her homework on, re: orig. MSRP(don’t any of these people look at manufacturers websites or check the Walthers catalog?), how truely not rare or hard to find the item is,etc. My favorite recent one, which I posted on another thread, was the 2007 Walthers N catalog for over $20.00 plus over $20.00 shipping!
Having said all that, there are some pretty good deals some times on ebay if you do you’re homework and you’re willing to “walk away” when bids like this one go crazy.
Jim
Just have a look here…
http://www.caboosehobbies.com/catalog/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=&products_id=6826
It amazes me to see things like this, but it is typical of eBay.
Edit: I will say that I don’t know how rare the cabooses in the auctions were, though. I notice that they are both different than the one in the link that I posted.
P.T. Barnum would have loved E-Bay! What I don’t get is how do these people that make these ridiculous purchases GET their disposable income in the first place? It doesn’t seem like they’re very smart with their money. And you know there’s at least 2 of these geniuses out there to get the bidding up that high.[%-)]
OK. The one at Caboose hobbies is the one just shipped and is still at some places. The ones on ebay are out of production for years and hard to find. There are people who collect Safety caboose (cabeese?) and pay that kind of money to find certain ones., They were originally done by Bevbel in 8 different schemes on Athearn bodies and were some of the fastest selling items Bevbel did. When you have the money, it is fun to play. If you can afford brass, you can afford $150 for a caboose.
I understand a little better now. I have myself seen (as has been cited on these forums before) where folks will pay well over retail on items that are readily available through other sources at or below retail. I wasn’t sure if this was one of those situations. Thanks.
‘Bid-O-Rama’ just sets in. A couple of weeks ago I was looking at a P2K C&NW GP7 #1558. The bidding started at around $35. I went to a MRR Show that Saturday and paid $45 for the same exact same engine, ‘new in the box’. A few days later I was cleaning out my ‘My eBay’ stuff and noticed that it sold for something like $150!
Some folks just ‘get the fever’ and become embroiled in ‘bidding wars’ - A man just needs to know his limits!
Jim Bernier
That’s absolutely nuts…On average I’ve paid $170 per crummy for my brass caboose roster…
Sad but I hope this person is happy. Hopefully, sooner or later, he’ll wind up finding out this model usually sells for on the hobby market.
Even if t is disposable income, chances are good that had he/she found out that this caboose can still be bought for the $20 range, the leftover money would have likely been put to good use.
But, we live and learn…
That’s what I love about a free market economy. Every transaction is made at a price that is agreeable to both the buyer and the seller. I can’t say that I would have paid so much for what seems to be a rather ordinary piece, but apparently this buyer wanted it badly and couldn’t find it available elsewhere. Supply and demand rules.
It does make me feel like I got a steal on a long OOP FSM enginehouse that I got last weekend for $159. I know that there are lots of 2 stall enginehouse kits out there but I wanted THAT enginehouse, a limited run replica of John Allen’s award winning enginehouse. I probably would have paid twice that much if necessary.
Like the old saying goes, a fool and his money are soon parted…
Any time I encounter something on eBay that hooks me, I start doing a research to find out what the average going price is and go from there. If the item normally goes for $25.00, I put in a bid for that amount, but if it goes over that and I loose the item, I buy it from another source. In other words, just because it ain’t on eBay doesn’t mean that’s the end of it…
Tracklayer
You KNOW the seller was happy![:P]
Ebay can be great and it can be a disaster. I’ve watched in amusement on a number of occasions as folks bid way beyond what a piece is really worth. But that’s their right!
For me, I regularly buy excellent brass cabin cars in the $50 range.
Some folks ‘want what they want, when they want it,’ and are willing and able to pay what the more frugal among us think is an outrageous price.
Likewise, my aging Toyota X-cab pickup takes me down the road at the same (legal) speed as Joe Jones’ latest and greatest ‘Green Machine’ or Frank Filthyrich’s classic Lamborghini. The only difference is, I can park my rig in a shopping mall lot and be absolutely certain that it’ll still be there when I come back. (Translation - it’s not worth stealing, even to strip!)
What deters me from using E-bay is what deters my wife from buying clothes from QVC - we want to see the physical object with the Mark I mod 0 eyeballs before putting money on it.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
If he was looking for exactly that car, and if that car is rare today - which I don’t know - I CAN FEEL WITH HIM! To explain: I am looking for a H0scale WALTHERS Trainline 60’ RPO lettered for B&O. I know the MRSP was about 25 to 30, but I am looking since about half a year - and did find ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!! I search ebay EVERY DAY with several keywords - including the roadname “B&O”, and “Baltimore & Ohio”, and “rpo” alone - but nothing to find! I need it to complete my B&O train - therefore I would pay considerably more than MRSP! Because of situations like this I am careful to describe such people as being crazy.
The worth of anything is what someone is willing to pay for it, so obviously this piece was worth $152 to the buyer. It must have been worth it to at least one other person as well since it got bid up to that level. What makes rare coins or stamps so valuable? Nothing except that collectors of these items want them badly and there are so few of them. If it wasn’t for collectors, old stamps, no matter how rare, would go into the waste paper basket. Old coins would be worth nothing more than their face value. There obviously is a reason this particular piece was prized by at least two bidders and it probably isn’t readily available from another source. We might not understand it, but they surely did.
Just a few more words. There is a difference between a collector and the average model railroader. In the HO market, there are few collectors - however… Some collect for instance Lionel HO, or all the old Varney they can find. Now, there are people that collect all the cars they can find in their favorite road name etc. There are people who collect cabooses (I for one) and IF - this guy is a collector and needs that one particular item to complete a collection, the price becomes secondary. It can be a little hard to understand in HO or N, but if you get acquainted with Lionel or American Flyer collectors it is much easier to understand. I used to work for a guy that collected American Flyer. One year for Xmas, his wife bought him a Flyer out of production set. She told me she paid $2000.00 for it because it was the one item he didn’t have that he wanted. This would have been in the 80’s.