New yet old

[johnez]

Hello to all of you,
I am new to model railroading, but I am working with old equipment. My father who is 80 has a good collection of brass O gauge engines and cars. They are all from the 1940's and early 1950's. We are trying to determine the value of some of his collection. If the electric motors are still good after being in storage for 60 years, and if O gauge is the direction we should go.

We would welcome any help that you may have to offer.

John Z

 

[montanan]

If you check in a magazine such as Model railroader, look in the classified section and there are usually brass dealers listed. I have visited a number of O scale layouts over the years and most of them are extremely large, requiring a lot of space. I enjoy the detail that can be found in O scale. I did some custom painting for an O scale collector a number of years back painting his Milwaukee Road locomotives and rolling stock. He has to have a few hundred different locomotives and rolling stock in the basement of his store. I found it a lot easier to paint the O scale compared to HO. So much easier, but with all of the O scale equipment he had, he didn't have room for a layout. Please keep this in mind.

 

[johnez]

Montanan,

Thank you for the feedback. After looking at my fathers engines some would definitely require a large turning radius. He has a Cab Forward that is immense in size and weight. On the other hand he has a Shay logging engine that would require much less radius. I will look in some magazines for pricing if he decides to sell the Cab Forward.

Thanks,
John

 

[skillman]

Welcome to the forum johnez.
When I was first getting into the hobby, about 52 years ago now, I attended club meetings of a model RR club at my Uncle's place. He had a big barn/shop that we were building an O scale layout in the upstairs. As a kid it looked huge but when we were removing everything after his passing it looked much smaller. I would guess that the shop was probably 36X48 or there abouts. I don't think that the layout would have been any too big for the large U.P. steam that Vance had in his collection and it ran around the walls of the shop. Thinking back it was not as wide upstairs because of the roof. The point is that as Montanan pointed out it takes a lot of room for O scale.

Steve

 

[johnez]

Skillman,

Thank you for the feedback. Space is a big issue with the O gauge. Hopefully there are still some out there who use O gauge and might be interested in some of these larger engines.

Regards,
John

 

[montanan]

You may be suprised. I know of a few collectors. It all depends on what you have and how many people are intrested in your locomotive. Being that these are older locomotives, the chances are that there may not be many available and this could work in your favor. Keep us posted on how things go.