now, this is scary! i ate lots of 15 cent candy bars, and i don’t think i’m that old 
calvin.
Calvin,
No offense intended - honest! You are only as old as you want to be!
BTW: A couple of years ago - when my son was about 4, he used to be punished for minor infractions by losing “privledges” ie: TV, videos etc. He asked me if I used to lose privledges when I was a kid. I told him that I did. He asked me if I lost videos. He didn’t seem to understand when I said there were no such things as videos when I was a kid. Now I know how my dad felt when I would ask him why when he was kid his family sat around and “watched” the radio! What comes around goes around!!
In real world prices a MR for 60 cents,a Athearn boxcar for $1.25,Power chaises for a Hobbytown of Boston RS3 $9.95. The body kit was $8.95.A brass Tenshodo GP20 $22.95,a brass PFM ATSF 2-8-0 $39.95,A PFM B2 Shay 2 truck $42.95 the list goes on .The average Union factory job paid around $120 a week before taxes-and there was a lot of union jobs back then.BTW the very first summer job I had I made $80.00 a week before taxes.Life was good back then.
Okay, I will weigh in with my inflation adjusted two cent’s worth. While not directly responsive to your question, I think the spirit of it is this:
This is a fantasy hobby. It’s all about imagination, whether you’re a “rivet counter” or not. When I got into the hobby in the early sixties, most modestly priced equipment came with cast piping, grab irons and the like. We didn’t love it then, but we could pretend it was the real thing. Nowadays, even the modestly priced stuff has infinitely better detailing and most of it performs
better and more reliably. Back in the sixties, PFM and, I believe Tenshodo, among others, offered brass locos in the $300.00 range. They featured lost wax castings and a high degree of detail but were unpainted.
No matter which aspects of the hobby you enjoy most, benchwork, wiring, building, operating, etc., realism has to rank way, way up there on your priorities. Given all that, I believe you get at least as much bang for your buck today as you ever did - maybe more. What value do you attach to the time you spent lovingly aging, weathering and superdetailing or just watching the beautiful little things go 'round and 'round?
BTW, when I was in my teens cokes and candy bars were a nickel except for a couple of premium items that went for a dime, which we normally passed on in favor of two of the nickel jobbies.
To all: enjoy the hobby and don’t fret.
Fifteen cent candy bars? I remember when a Baby Ruth was 5 cents! Boy, is my age showing. From the description of what AHC in New York was like, is it possible that it is now called Trainland / Trainworld? From what I have been told by a person who has been there, it sounds similar to the description of AHC.
I think they may have been much cheaper than that. As a teenage model railroader in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s I purchased a brass 2-6-0 with a Vanderbilt tender for $35.00 and a Shay for $60.00. I had a paper route and the hobby shop owner allowed me to pay for them a with few dollars a week. They were both undecorated and brush painted and hand lettered them. They were sold off when I got out of the hobby, wish I had them now! [:(]
Bob Boudreau
Yes, this is scarey. I can remember eating 15 cent candy bars and reading some article saying that candy bars, with the rate of inflation, would cost almost a dollar by the year 2000. Yikes!
As to trains, I think prices were kept extremely low (almost too low) until the 1990s, when they started shooting up. Compared to the long view (from the 50s or 60s to today) prices are still reasonable. But complared to what they were 10-15 years ago (when $5 freight cars will still common, as were locos under $50), prices have doubled, tripled and quadrupled.
In 1969, my first PFM NKP Berkshire was 64.95 unpainted. The PFM Santa Fe 3776 class 4 8 4 was 99 bucks and some of the Tenshodo painted models were in the unheard of price of 125 to 145. These prices rose sharply durning the early 1970’s as the dollar to yen changed to favor Japan. By 1975, the Tenshodo challengers were about 585 and my first Key Challengers imported in 1986 cost me about 700, but that was not list price off course. I was shocked when the rerun of the PFM imported Tenshodo Big Boys came in at one-thousand dollars. I cancelled my Tenshod order and purchased a USH O scale Big Boy for just a few dollars more.
Today, the Trix runs better than any single early run brass that was made, unless you worked on it.
We have better models today available to us, but they are not cheap.