I’m disgruntled about all the fees, etc. from E-Bay and I’m getting annoyed by all the phishing and fraud that’s happening on Craig’s list.My other hobby is RC aircraft. I’ve found the marketplace on RC Universe (www.rcuniverse.com) to be absolutely fantastic! I’ve had great success using this – and it’s free!
Question: Is there a model train version/equivalent of RCU anywhere out there? Specifically buying/selling/trading used train stuff.
Thanks.
UPbid.net is starting to gain some ground. It is still small however. There are no listing fees.
If you model HO, check out the HOYARDSALE group on Yahoo. There’s one for N scale (NScaleYardSale), and probably other scales as well.
I’ve recently signed up for the Yahoo group HOyardsale. It seems pretty active although I haven’t actually bought or sold yet. This is only for HO scale stuff however. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HOYARDSALE/
I’ll third the HO Yardsale Yahoo group. It’s great! You can post items you want to buy too.
I’ve seen a bunch of other train auction sites, but when you click the item it takes you to E-Scam.
ho yardsale should be avoided like the plague . they are the most anal , picky bunch of people i have ever came across . RON
http://www.railbid.com/index.php
Here is another one called Railbid. I just found it and bought a GP7 Operating Manual for a reasonable price.
Now this is really useful stuff ! Thanks to all for posting these links.[:)]
I’ve not experienced that. I have a separate Yahoo email set up that receives all the new postings. If there’s something up for sale the interests me, I contact the seller off-list and the deal is done. Easy peasy. I hardly ever go to the actual group site in Yahoo.
I am on N scale Yard sale and think its great…Lots of nice folks and you can find almost anything you might need…It seems to be growing every day too…Jerry
Hoyardsale seems like a good alternative to EThing, BUT, be careful how you sign up - I got 20something e-mails from them this AM!!![:O]
I am almost fed up with eBay. Fee, after fee. I sold a engine last night for $130, and they took out $10, and Paypal took out $5.00. I understand they have to take something out, but hey I guess they have to make money. “That they are!!!”
I am trying the hoyardsale. I have a car on that website now. See what I can get for it. At least its fee free. Also like someone said, you might wanna get another email just for that website. You do get quite a bit of emails.
For those of you that are not happy with the Yahoo Group emails you receive, it is a very straight forward process to turn that off. IIRC, you need to access your Yahoo preferences for that particular group and change your email notifications to read that you will access the web site on your own (or words to that effect, my job blocks Yahoo access so I can’t “see” the exact wording right now. 
) Then you can just go to the site and check new messages on your own without all the spam to your inbox.
For what its worth, I have bought 7 items so far off HO Yard Sale, and have been TOTALLY satisfied. With NO fees! Do your due diligence as you would with buying or selling items through the classifieds or whatever and you’ll be happy.
Joe
MMM–most people that I know who have used this site seemed to have no problems. So, what happened witchoo? Explain please—[%-)]
Although I am a member of the HO Yardsale I don’t hang out there much. To find things you almost have to be on line a few times /day. The search feature is not the best and doing searches can be trying sometimes. I did inquire about a couple of items once only to find out they had been sold several days errlier. apparantly the sellers can not take down the posting after an item has sold. Not a big problem though. If somehow we could all get everyone to agree on one site/format it would be a big help. As I mentioned in an earlier post I do list some items on UPBID.net. it is the same format as Ebay but there are no listing fees and a small seller fee. Others like some of the other sites out there. As long as there is indecision amongst us about which site or format to use ebay will continue to flourish.
That should be www.trainboard.com with a period instead of a comma! [swg]
Twenty? That’s nothing. What can I tell you; it’s a healthy group! [;)] I have all of that going to my Yahoo email account, and I just go through it and delete whatever isn’t of interest to me. You can select the digest option in your group preferences, which will send you a single daily digest of all of the day’s postings. I was using that option in the beginning, but I was missing out on too many good deals, so I switched to individual emails.
I think the moderator does a good job of managing what could easily become an unwieldy situation, since the membership is quickly approaching 2500. When I joined in late '07 it was only about 800.
Interesting that the hoyardsale moderator sent an email that said they’d had a sudden surge of 27 new members. Coincidence with this thread?..
This forum gets a lot of traffic… [:)]