Prices in the "Good old Days"

[Anonymous]

There have been many many topics about the increase of prices in this hobby. While my gut reaction is that prices are really shooting up there, I wonder if they really are or is it that we are perceiving it as so?

What was the price of a Lionel train set in the 40's or 50's as a percent of the median family income? What was the price of certain items (engines, cars, track etc) back then as a percentage of median income?

How does that compare today with say a P2K engine and some stewart rolling stock?

I know the level of detail, operating qualities etc are different. I am just curious what it cost back then to get in the hobby with a decent setup as compared to now.

[cacole]

I can't speak for all products, but during the Great Depression a Lionel model of the Pioneer Zephyr was said to cost the equivalent of a used Model T Ford.

[chaya]

Well, I know in the 60's a little boy next door to us got a Lionel train set, and we were terribly jealous. There was no way our family could have spent that kind of money on the kids. We were middle-class, though you have to lower that a little because we lived on an island, which was more expensive. Still, my dad was an engineer at Boeing.

Today when I see Lionel trains I still think of rich people.

I don't think the prices have gone up, relatively speaking. I think that in my own N Scale, a good-looking engine for $70 or so that runs great is a good deal. There have been a lot of advances in scale trains. I wonder if people aren't expecting the old low prices for the new and improved equipment.

Cristi

[Anonymous]

And same old prices without taking into account inflation over the years. I can still hear my dad talking about 15 cent candy bars lol

[Big_Boy_4005]

I would say that generally speaking model railroading has always been somewhat expensive. Basic Lionel sets in the 50's sold for around $30 and up, today they go for around $150 and way up topping out around $700. HO has always been more affordable.

[garr]

In the mid 1970's, a new Atlas GP40(the original style with the slotted fuel tank) cost $25. Thirty years later, a much improved version can be purchased at most reasonably priced hobby shops for around $90. Thats an inflation rate of 4.5% anually. Using this as a guide, prices have remained fairly constant in HO.

Jay

[DSchmitt]

It depends on the product and point in time you pick to compare with.

Even similar products may not really be comparible. Comparing the price of a 1970's N scale Atlas GP9 with a 1990's model would lead one to conclude a huge inflation rate, but the quality of detail, prototype accuracy, and mechanism of the 1990's model is far superior making a direct comparison of price invalid.

There have been other threads on this topic in which posters have made some comparisions (usually from their own experience) of days or hours worked to buy a product such as (for the time) state of the art loco.

[IRONROOSTER]

I have found that when you compare identical products from the 70's and now that most of them have increased less than inflation. Look at Athearn blue box, MDC, Atlas, etc. Some where in another thread I did some numbers comparisons. What has changed is that there are many more highly detailed lines available now that do cost more. The $25-$30 HO boxcar of today does not have an equivalent in the 70's.

Is the hobby expensive? Well it has never been cheap, but if you are willing to use a bent piece of wire for the door handle of a boxcar (like one of my kits from the 70's) and similar shortcuts along with Athearn blue box, MDC, Atlas, etc. you can keep the cost down. Trouble is, most of us like the higher level of detail.
Enjoy
Paul

[Anonymous]

Ironrooster: Well, in a way the equivalent back in the 70's to todays $25-$30 boxcar was brass. In this respect I think prices have fallen.

DSchmidtt: I am not looking for "a direct comparison of price" as I know that would be invalid.

I guess what I am trying to determine is what people have spent on the hobby. As I said in the first post, I understand that things today are generally better running and more detailed than the models in the past. What I want to compare is the price it took someone to enter the hobby with a decent (by the standards of the time) set of equipment .

What has got me thinking along these lines are the threads talking about the high cost of the hobby recently. I do remember reading way back when that people talked about a good Lionel set costing a week's pay. I am thinking that a P2K locomotive 4 or 5 Proto or Accurail freight cars, some Atlas track and an MRC power pack cost less than a week's pay. Is this a valid thought?

Is the hobby more expensive now than say in the 40's and 50's or are people not willing to pay as big a chunk of their salary on it? Or is it that there are other things attracting our free money that wasn't around then? (ie: do we eat out more? have more hobbies?)

[andrechapelon]

QUOTE: Originally posted by dkelly

There have been many many topics about the increase of prices in this hobby. While my gut reaction is that prices are really shooting up there, I wonder if they really are or is it that we are perceiving it as so?

What was the price of a Lionel train set in the 40's or 50's as a percent of the median family income? What was the price of certain items (engines, cars, track etc) back then as a percentage of median income?

How does that compare today with say a P2K engine and some stewart rolling stock?

I know the level of detail, operating qualities etc are different. I am just curious what it cost back then to get in the hobby with a decent setup as compared to now.

The original Lionel Scale Hudson of 1937 sold for $75.00. At about the same time (at least according to a 1941 edition of Life magazine), the average income in the US was about $1200/year or about $100 a month. IIRC, the average income in the US roughly is about $45,000 today or about $3750/month. To have the same ratio of price to income as the original Scale Hudson, a modern version would have to sell for about $2800 (vs about a $900 or so actual price). And it wouldn't have TMCC and sound.

My first engine was an Athearn rubber band drive F7 I bought in 1957. I paid $6.95 for it. At today's prices, it would retail for something like $35-40. A Varney "Casey Jones" was $22.50 at the same time. Bowser sells the same (well, almost the same) engine for $114.95, which is actually roughly equivalent to its 1957 price.

We've had roughly 4% year inflation on average since WWII (although most of it came in the period 1975-1990). 4%/year means prices double approximately every 18 years. It's been almost 48 years since 1957. At a 4%/year increase, the Casey Jones would have sold for $90 in 1993 (36 years later).

I really have to shake my head at people who complain about the price of the hobby because:

1. It's never been a cheap hobby.

2. Prices for locos, cars, track, etc., are not out of line with other prices on an historical basis.

3. The quality and detail is vastly superior to what it was when I bought my first locomotive.

4. Quantity is no substitute for quality (it's not he who dies with the most toys wins, it's he who dies with the BEST toys wins).

[soapbox]

Andre

[CNJ831]

dkelly - In reply to the final paragraph of your post, in the 1940's (before and just after the war) the hobby was indeed very expensive, far more than today with regard to locomotive prices, and if you were not a craftsman as well you were really out of luck. In the 1950's, however, the hobby rapidly became dramatically cheaper and it was a lot easier for the average guy to become involved. By 1960 the typical "state-of-the-art", non-brass, locomotive was relatively quite a bit cheaper than its equal today. For a quarter century thereafter prices rose only slowly in our hobby and it remained really quite affordable.

There are several glaring faults with all these threads about then vs. now. The first is no one bothers to compare list prices of quality items from say 1990 to now, when the great rise in top-end prices actually took place. You are paying more for some plastic models today then you paid for similar brass items 15 years ago. Likewise, everyone wants to bring the CPI into the discussion when it really isn't directly applicable. Model trains are a luxury items, not necessities like food and shelter. TVs, computers, and gameboys are more comparable items and these grow cheaper with time in spite of great advances in technology. Yes, the train market is much smaller than these others but that does not justify huge and steady increases in pricing. There is also the weak excuse that you are getting more for your money today. In fact, all it is is current state-of-the-art. In many cases you were getting the best possible for the time 10 or 15 years ago and paying relatively quite a bit less for it. You can't say you are getting more for you money today simply because technoloy has advanced. In 1955 those who had been in the hobby since before the war thought the advent of new locos by Mantua and John English had been handed down directly from God! Ten years from now we'll undoubtedly look back at today's best engines as relative clunkers.

CNJ831

[sparkingbolt]

In 1976 an Athearn tank or box car was about $1.98, a loco about 16 bucks. An AMT model truck was around $6.00 Now those AMTs are around $32, and they're still the same old ones as they reintroduce them. About 5 times higher to our train's 3 times higher.

When you factor in the better quality of today's model RR stuff, I do think we are getting a better deal today. RTR steam then meant Rivarossi's high geared speed machines, or other mediocre offerings, with the exception of Tyco-Mantua. Even then if you wanted them to run good you had to remotor and/or regear. The Mantuas were awfully simple on the details.

Deisels are better now than then all around.

Affordable RTR Shays and Climaxes weren't even heard of. (MDC's didn't count here)
Rivarossi did come through in the early '80s with a nice if noisy Heisler. (still have mine)

And if we want we can still get many of the old standbys that were available then: MDC kits, Bowser, etc.

I dont think we'll look at today's smooth runners and call them clunkers in 10 years. I have a 22 year old mantua mikado with "Power Drive" (an underrated feature) I couldn't believe how smoothly it ran in the early '80s. It runs as smoothly as anything offered today. Smooth is smooth and will remain so, age not withstanding.

Yup, I stand by my opinion, not that it is a cheap hobby, it never was. But it hasn't been blown out of proportion any more than anything else. We have it better now. Dan

[Fergmiester]

30 years ago the Canadian $ was $1.15 US and my Dad would drive for a half hour out of the city to get gas at 42 cents instead of the 46 cents in the city. That was an Imperial gallon now it's 92 cents a litre, which = $4.18 CDN/Imperial gallon

And a Rivarossi Hudson could be bought for $69

And "they" have just informed us that heating oil is going up considerably. Pray for a warm winter, especially for the elderly and low income earners!

[BRAKIE]

First let us use the real term for the good old days.I call them the bad old days.You see you had to spend more time building locomotives or tweaking the RTR locomotives to get them to run smoothly this was needed more for diesels then steam locomotives.[;)][:D]
As far as todays prices they are completely out of hand and there seems to be no let up as the prices keep going up faster then the price of gas or inflation. .[:(!]
The best solution is to buy at the best discount and then buy only what you need...

[CBQ_Guy]

The price has gone up too fast. One example, my LHS still has a couple of the first Atlas RTR cars, hoppers, and the price tag says something like 10 or 11 bucks. These came out in about the past 10 years. The latest Atlas RTR stuff on the same shelf area has gone up over twice that amount. Too big an increase in too short a time, IMO. And that's just one example out of many.

I'm glad I purchased the bulk of my locos and rolling stock within the past dozen or so years before the market went nuts.

[3railguy]

In 1954, a Lionel Santa-Fe F-3 super chief was $90 MSRP or a Lackawana Trainmaster set for $60 MSRP. A decent 027 set was $50 MSRP. These prices were a weeks pay for many people.

[BR60103]

In 1953, my first Lionel set cost about the same as my father was paying monthly for a 2 bedroom apartment. ($50-55) This was a mid-line O-27 set, but the bottom line O gauge set was the same. (Canadian prices were usually US price + 50%).
And back then, you could buy locomotive kits in sections; a section probably gave you a month's building.

[Anonymous]

John and David,

That sort of puts things in perspective to me. A person really had to make quite the monetary outlay in the 50's to get into this hobby. I hope P2K, Kato etc. don't come with an engine that costs a week's pay - unless it was 12 inches to the foot scale!

David - intesting statement at the end of your post. "you could buy locomotive kits in sections, a section probably gave you a month's building." I posted something similar to that somewhere around here. Someone wrote in MR years ago about the "play value" of our hobby dollars vs other hobbies. The general idea was that for the same price, of say a night of bowling, you could by a craftsman kit. The night of bowling lasted a few yours, the kit, maybe a week or month. The dollar per hour was much lower in our hobby. I am currently working on a micro engineering city viaduct kit. At the rate I'm going, the construction of the whole thing will come out to be about $1.00 per hour, not bad. This isn't counting the number of hours it will provide trackage once it's installed on the layout.

While I have nothing against the current trend of RTR products, I do think such things lead to a perception of higher prices. You buy a RTR engine for, say $100.00. It's out of the box, on the layout in about 5 minutes. It looks great, runs great, wow, I need another. The next day another $100.00 egine etc etc. A 30.00 Athearn blue box. Assemble it. Add grab irons and other detail parts. Tweak the drive train for better running. Weather it. Add the decoder. Even if the total cost is the same, you probably spent 2 or 3 evenings working on the engine. Besides the immense satisfaction of seeing a blue box diesel look and perform darn near the same as those RTR engines (ok, maybe I'm the only one that gets that sort of satisfaction), the dollar per hour cost of the hobby is much lower.

Just my opinion.

[CNJ831]

With regard to the last few posts, one has to be very careful in comparing tinplate prices to the HO prices in the early 1950's. Remember, at that time tinplate was at its peak and commanded a tidy sum. At the same time, HO was much cheaper. Modelers had a fairly wide choice of diesel road locomotives from such retailers as America's Hobby Center in NYC for between $12 and $20 or a steamer for $5 to $10 dollars more (switchers were cheaper). Freight cars mainly retailed for $2 to $3, with many passenger cars about double those figures. That $90 for a Lionel F-3 set would equip an HO modeler with a fine train and enough money left over to complete a goodly portion of a modest-sized layout.

CNJ831

[Anonymous]

CNJ831

Good point. Whatever happened to AHC? I remember they used to have the first few pages in every issue. Actually went there once, it was a pretty neat place on four floors of a building in downtown NY. Each hobby (trains, models, RC etc) had its own floor.

Even using the AHC prices (which were discounted off MSRP) a $2 dollar freight car in the 50's would be about the equivalent of $15-18 dollars today I'm thinking, or even more. Just looking at the price of 1st class postage, I believe was .03 in the 50's. It's .37 today. In 1964 a Ford Mustang was $2400, today starting price is $20,000.

I'm thinking that prices have pretty much stayed about even with lots of other stuff. Some mrr stuff is cheaper, some more expensive, but it appears to be no more than the "good ole days."

[cmitcham]

QUOTE: Originally posted by dkelly

And same old prices without taking into account inflation over the years. I can still hear my dad talking about 15 cent candy bars lol

now, this is scary! i ate lots of 15 cent candy bars, and i don't think i'm that old :(

calvin.

[Anonymous]

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!!

[BRAKIE]

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.

[sailor38]

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.

[cacole]

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.

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by sailor38

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.

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

[jfugate]

QUOTE: Originally posted by cmitcham

QUOTE: Originally posted by dkelly

And same old prices without taking into account inflation over the years. I can still hear my dad talking about 15 cent candy bars lol

now, this is scary! i ate lots of 15 cent candy bars, and i don't think i'm that old :(

calvin.

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.

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by FundyNorthern

QUOTE: Originally posted by sailor38

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.

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

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.