I just opened a long forgotten box of train junk, leftover from my early days in the hobby and I thought you guys might get a kick out of what I found.
!st was an old Varney EMD yard engine with egg shaped wheels. I remember when I tried to run it over about 3 scale miles per hour, it would jump up and down so much it lost electrical contact with the rails. Not a real problem since the starting voltage was so high, it usually just made one leap and quit.
Next I found a rubber band drive Athearn F unit. I recall getting the wrong “twist” on a couple of the rubber bands when I was a kid and the darned thing just fought itself and skittered back and forth on the track until I figured out what was wrong.
Then I came across something relevant to the price rants we see now and then. Most of us remember the Blue Box Athearn kits but how many remember the Yellow Box kits??? I found a box that had contained a 50’ box car with a factory sticker price of 1.69 and a 40’ box car with a price tag of 1.29.
Having worked part time for a hobby distributor when I was a kid, I have some knowledge of pricing from those years gone by. A wholesale distributor used to pay 40% of retail for case lots from the manufacturer. That means that 40’ box car cost the distributor about 52 cents and the retail hobby shop got if for 60% which means he paid 78 cents for it and made a whopping 51 cent profit.
Later, I got a job on the real railroad and earned almost enough to buy two of those cars every hour.
Oh yes I recall the Yellow Box kits. The streamlined passenger cars at least came in yellow boxes. Anybody else recall the black Athearn boxes “For the Particular Model Builder”?
Oh yes, I remember yellow box kits. Over half of my “fleet” is yellow box kits. But, most folks now know them as BB kits. OK, that’s fine. I also have an Athearn Hi-F drive F-7. That one will probably become a spare dummy unit. My first Athearn kit was a Carnation Reefer for $1.69. The interesting thing is that the doors opened. I think Athearn changed the tooling about 5 years later and the doors and body became one piece. The size of the “hinges” was grossly out of scale, but the opening doors was kind of fun. I hope you found some real gems in that box.
This post brought back a few memories. Back in the early sixties I was passing throught Casper Wyoming and stopped at what I would call an early Dollar Store (can’t recall exactly) it might have been an .88 cent store…and there I found a selection of yellow Athearn kits for $.88 each. Some of them are still alive and well on the LM&E.
one is a Frisco 40’ box, another is a 40’ CN&W cattle car, there is an SantaFe reefer, but would have to go and look to refresh my memory about the others…
Those were the days… I was driving a 1959 Chev, Bel-air 2dr hard top. Loved that car. [tup][tup]
A high percentage of my rolling stock and passenger cars is from the 1950s and early 60s. They have been cleaned and upgraded to Kadee couplers and metal wheels. Old engines, including those rubber-band drive models, now run as sound dummies, some even with lights. Structures have been painted, illuminated or chopped into kitbashes. Old, poorly-detailed figures inhabit structures where they can only be seen through small windows. Old plastic “cereal box” automobiles inhabit scrapyards, just like their prototypes, rusted and falling apart.
When I pulled my old trains out of their boxes, the most immediately interesting item was the newspapers they were wrapped in.