Pricing electric trains is probably much more difficult than grading them. I price probably as many trains a month as anyone else in this business and sometimes I feel as if I haven't a clue what I'm doing! The object of pricing an item for sale is to price it realistically so that within a reasonable amount of time the item will sell. But whether it will sell is not entirely up to the seller. It takes a willing buyer to agree on the price to establish the actual selling price.

Sometimes I know I underprice items. Those are the ones that shoot out the door faster than a speeding bullet. Thank goodness my computer keeps track of those so I can adjust the price the next time one comes along. And then there are those items that sit around taking up that valuable space for years. Fortunately that doesn't happen very often, but it does happen. I try to alleviate the problem by using a special program that automatically lowers the price on items that we have had in stock for to long. You can tell the ones that have been lowered because they almost always have odd cents after them due to the percentage decrease.

I have an advantage over most in pricing trains in that we have a huge database with actual selling history data. Our price guide, which I will talk more about later is based on this selling history. When I actually price items I use our selling history more than I use the books.

Bruce Greenberg has done more for train collecting than anyone else that I can think of in recent times. He is the founder of Greenberg Publications. He sold the business to Kalmbach Publishing a number of years ago, and is no longer involved as far as I know.

But he is the guy that we all should thank for the information that we have today on electric trains. His books are works of art in themselves in that the information is invaluable. If you collect trains and don't have any of the guide books, you are missing the boat. I generally recommend that the first thing someone new to our hobby do is buy the book of the area they are interested in. Read it, then start buying trains.

I met Bruce Greenberg once at a train show in Pittsburgh, Pa. Actually come to think of it, it was a Greenberg show, although it was the only one that I had ever seen him attend.

I remember he was looking at a standard gauge caboose that was displayed on my table at the show. The caboose was priced at or a little under the Greenberg price guide at the time. It was obvious that he was very interested in the caboose the way that he looked at it repeatedly, asked me questions, and made comments. Finally he gave me an offer which I couldn't live with, and then walked away.

This never came to me until I got the idea to write this article, but isn't it ironic that his book specified the price that I had asked and he himself passed!!

This says nothing whatsoever against Mr. Greenberg, because it is the buyer's prerogative whether to buy or pass for whatever reason. But it does say that although the information in price guides is excellent, the pricing is not written in stone. The fact that you price something under or over the guide prices does not guarantee that you will sell it or not sell it. The books are only guides. And in the case of the small pocket book guides that come out every year, sometimes I wonder why they are wasting the paper!!

In my opinion, the last several years of the Greenberg pocket guides have been hastily put together for the sole purpose of an annual money maker. Almost everyone involved with Lionel and American Flyer trains buys the annual pocket price guide, myself included? The pricing data does not make a whole lot of sense to me, although I admit I don't do train shows, and that is what the data is based on. A horrible example of editing can be found on pages 147 through 149 in this years book. Check out the numerical order of the items on these pages. For a book that is supposed to be refined over the years, this is somewhat of a major error. This book is dated 1901-2000, yet there are very few items with pricing data from 1996 and up. I have no understanding why that would be except for laziness, because these items are obviously sold at train shows! The TM book goes to the trouble to price more recent items. In general the book doesn't make much sense as far as pricing changes go. It appears as if they are going by trend rather than individual prices. And I disagree with some of their trends!!!

[After saying all this about a product published under the Kalmbach name, I would like to say that I consider Kalmbach publishing to be one of the finest companies in the train market today. They publish Classic Toy Trains, Model Railroader, and other publications which are all the finest you can find. I just feel that their Lionel Pocket Guide needs much improvement and re-commitment. But I am sure I will still buy it every year regardless if for no other reason than curiosity! Hopefully they will consider the previous paragraph as constructive feedback!]

Then there is the TM book, which in my opinion is far superior to the current Greenberg pocket guide as far as pricing accuracy in regard to modern Lionel trains. (Their post war prices are way to high for New in my humble opinion. I've had some new boxed items over the years, and never was very successful obtaining anywhere near their prices for them.) They don't offer a book that is indexed by number, making it very difficult to work with. In my opinion they would blow Greenberg out of the woods if they offered a book that was indexed this way and used more grades rather than just Like New and New. It is explained at the beginning of the book that you can use a formula to figure out the lesser grades, but who has time for that, and how accurate could that be?

Traincity.com has a free on-line price guide which can be found in the features menu. It also has problems of which some are: it hasn't been updated in around 2 years, it isn't complete, and it definitely has editing problems as it is generated by a computer program using our sales history. I will say this though, the prices are more accurate as they are ‘really' based on actual sales. (If only they weren't 2 years old!) Hopefully I will be able to do something about this in the near future.

Over the years the guide books have changed as far as pricing trends. A number of years ago I used the American Flyer pocket guide as a wholesale reference and actually paid full book value when I bought collections. The Marx book was so underpriced that it was a joke back then.

I can't remember who told me this, but I believe it was a fellow dealer at a show. At the time someone affiliated with a particular book was trying to buy the type trains that the book dealt with. Thus the prices in the book were extremely low. The same dealer then indicated, just wait until the guy is ready to sell, the prices will shoot through the roof!!

I have no clue if this was true, but I thought it was interesting as some of those books had unrealistically low prices at the time.

OK, if it was a perfect world, there would be a perfect price guide.

As an alternative I have found some sellers of trains using the TCA Quarterly journal low prices, which seems to be pretty accurate in that I purchased a collection recently using data from the seller in this way.

But none the less, I still use the guidebooks a lot when pricing and quoting prices for collections. Even though the prices may be off, you can figure that into the formula.

I was once told before we started choochooauctions.com, that ebay would become in itself a price guide for electric trains. I disagree with that assumption. There are a lot of bidders that don't know much about trains or train prices that are bidding especially on ebay. And when the competition factor comes in and you have three or four uninformed people bidding, it is unbelievable the amount of money that can be realized. On the other hand you can have an auction that at that particular time, the right people aren't bidding thus an item goes way to low.

There are just to many uncontrollable factors to consider on-line auction prices as totally accurate, or even remotely close.

One thing about the auctions though is that when the last day comes, and if an item is under priced, it does receive a number of bids and the price is usually corrected. But not always!

To say I received $500.00 for an item that should have gone for $200.00, so now the value is $500.00, isn't a very good assumption in my opinion.

Once, out of curiosity I placed the exact same lot on choochooauctions and ebay. I received over 25% more on one site than the other. So how do you call that one? I am sure your first thought is that ebay is much bigger, so it is only natural that the higher amount was realized there. Well guess what, I received 25% more on choochooauctions.com!! Does that make sense? About as much sense as using on-line auctions as a price guide!!

When selling trains try to be as reasonable with your prices as possible. Don't worry about what you paid, because that will tend to push your asking price higher than a seller may even be willing to negotiate. Don't try to sell something that you are in love with, because that will tend to inflate your asking price also. (I strongly don't ever recommend trying to sell your wife either!) Don't rely on just one price reference, but use two or three wherever possible and establish what you believe to be a fair price to both yourself and the buyer. If your price is only fair to you, it will be very difficult to find an interested buyer. Don't second guess yourself once you have established an asking price. Stick by it, if it is fair, the item will sell. If the item doesn't sell after a reasonable amount of time, don't hesitate to lower it.

If you are using one of the on-line auction services don't try to make it a store instead of an auction by setting your starting bid or reserve to high. This is the biggest mistake people make in auctions because bidders are not looking to buy something from a vendor, they want to win it by bidding. All of my auctions start at $2.00 with no reserve. That way I let the bidders price the item, rather than myself. I price enough stuff already!

And if you are to busy to do all that pricing and individual selling, consider selling as one lot to an individual buyer. If you need the name of a guy who is always interested in buying train collections, let me know!

If you have comments or feedback regarding this article or any subject having to do with electric trains, please feel free to visit our message boards, where you can discuss topics related to trains with other train enthusiasts.

 Back to Archives

Revised 2/20/00