With all the noise about the high cost of the this hobby sometimes there are great bargains to be had. At the Hobby Lobby annual sale our local store had some Mantua Classics 0-6-0 Tank Switchers half price! I bought one not having any idea what I would do with it other than it looked cool. The box said it was DCC ready so I said well ok. I’ve had on order from Loys Toys some TCS T1 decoders and they arrived just in time. I looked at the switchers schematics and could not see where you would fit the decoder. The engine will fit in the palm of my hand. Unscrewed the thing into a million pieces and there was a 9 pin DCC plug. Installed the decoder and wow the little thing scoots. It doesn’t really fit anywhere in the scheme of my railroad but sure is cool and DCC to boot. Mantua engine $20 + TCS T1 decoder $15 = a good time.
hobby lobby does have good deals on occasion…i got some metal BNSF open bay hoppers for half price the other day…3 hoppers came to $23 bucks…now that’s the coolest thing ever!..chuck
I was at George’s Trains in Toronto and they had 25% off of everything in their store for boxing week. I picked up a bunch of things including 3 Athearn Genesis 60’ TTX box cars that are almost impossible to find up here in Canada for 22.50 each and thats Canadian dollars.
Get your butt down to Timonium MD to the Great Scale Train show. Feb 5 & 6
Plan to spend 2 days there. They have 700 vendors! The first day is to buy all of the really neat stuff as there will be a lot of individual modelers there, so they will be cleaning out their collections of stuff.
The second day is when the vendors start lowering prices as they do not want to take the stuff home with them.
Last year on day 2 we (members of our Club) were buying HO cars (using the pop can cardboard low sided boxes) all you could pile in for $20.00. I ended up with 22 gondolas (thats $1.00 a piece) and these were Proto, Athearn and others. I even got an old Revell gon (collectors item) for a buck.
There was one vendor (that must have lost his mind) as he was selling Atlas engine (NIB -New In Box) with decoders for $40.00.
The only reason I did not buy any of them as I was out of money!
Oh the Hobby Lobby sale is always cool. You never know what they will have. The best part is the Switcher! Diecast metal parts, good details and the box and packaging is fantastic. Not the cheap Model Power packaging. It even came with a railer. I have a Mantua 0-4-0 switcher that a friend gave me before he moved to Australia and it runs good too. Details on the new unit are better. It was just kind of odd that they had these units and that they just didn’t fit with the rest of the locomotives they normally carry.
There are two Hobby Lobby’s in my town and neither has any train stuff worth while. You rarely see anything in N scale. The only things I managed to buy on sale were some trees for Jamie’s layout.
Where are these stores you guys are talking about?
February 5th and 6th? It happens on Sunday and Monday? I thought it was usually over Saturday and Sunday. But oh well, I’ll have to see if I can make it on the 5th then. I hope I hope I hope.[;)]
I went to the one in October and it was really cool. The trouble is I rode down alone and most of what I saved went into the gas tank. Here at Indiana, the guys talk about carpooling down, then come up with excuses. This has happened twice so last time I just bit the bullet.
The February show is the really big one. In the past we went to the others but everyone there always said that the Feb show was the one to go to - and it was!
This year we are looking to have 5 of us going and we are going down on Friday and staying over 2 nights.
Yes the cost of gas sucks but what elase doesn’t cost a lot now a days.