End Of Auction Notice -- discussion and observations

[Big_Boy_4005]

This has been a very interesting auction to watch. Even though the forum is not intended to be used to promote the sale of something, there is much that can be learned here. Take a look at the bids and bidders. This is pretty much the pattern that I see on many of the eBay auctions I look at.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5900626994

Was there any illegal activity here? I don't know, I suppose it is possible. Did posting the information here benefit the seller? I don't know, maybe someone here placed a bid, but it wasn't me.

I think that it is also very interestng that Bill Braskey has gone around and deleted much of what he posted.

[Kooljock1]

I really didn't follow this too closely, but apparently "wato44" was here and on the OGR Forum asking whether the product HE was selling was a good deal. The whole point was to juice-up his bids.

I actually did click on his auctions, and honestly had no interest in cheaply-made 60's LIONEL trains.

Was any damage done? Probably not.

Were the Forum Members, both here and at OGR used?

Probably.

Jon [8D]

[Anonymous]

Well, I see no obvious problems. But for the money that was thrown down for this item they had better be factory mint.

I refuse to put up that kind of money for this item. This was between people who had alot of money and a desire to own this item. (Collectors)

I do a bit of eBay myself and twice acquired a locomotive at less than 30% of retail and fought off several people for needed items by sniping at the last minute. I plan my buys carefully.

But this large jump from $300 something to over $700 apparently took one of the people out of the bidding. (Proxy bix maximuims were in play here) that was when the house mortaging started.

I am happy for however won this item and also for the seller but this is one of a few sales that I have seen that were "Outrageously" expensive, and dangerously close to "I have more money than you do so I get this item *Bump" kind of thing.

[Big_Boy_4005]

Gee Jon, were we really "used" or simply informed of the sale?

I'm still not totally convinced that Bill was the seller, but the fact that after being confronted on it he tried to remove the topic, is suspicious.

Beyond that, I have to completely agree with HighIron. Leaving a large margin out on a proxy bid is a dangerous play. It opens you up to bumping and probing to push you as high as you will go. If this is done by a shill, and nobody else bids, the seller simply pays the fee and relists the item under a different name, and the process begins again.

The only thing we can do as honest buyers is set our own personal limits as to what we are willing to spend, and bid no higher. If we win, we win. If we don't, we keep shopping.

I'm lucky, I'm a bargain hunter, not a collector of high buck stuff. I buy common cars from recent production, and try to pick them up for less than retail. I know my limits.[swg]

[3railguy]

Shills are hard to detect. They hide behind screen names. Many times they are legitimate buyers in other auctions but pull a few shill jobs with sellers here and there so they look legitimate.

Hyping the common rocket car with the rare variation in another auction on these forums smelled like a rat to me.

The winning bidder has two negatives, this is one: "Never paid!4 emails, 1 phone call. Says he'll buy, never did. VERY POOR EBAYER "

We will never know, there is lots of misrepresented, phony, and/or overated junk on ebay and lots of BS and scams to get people LQQkING. In most cases people are wise. Or some people think its worht that. Prices are determined by how bad a person wants an item. My rule is never buy an item over $50 over the net unless I know him well through past dealings.

[Anonymous]

BILLbraskey went back and deleted his posts. Isn't that somewhat suspicious?

[Kooljock1]

Big,

If this guy was a shill, and like you I wasn't convinced until he de-listed his posts, he used us for our information. Many actually took time out of their busy schedules to look up their price guides to answer his questions. In that sense, we were used. Other than that, I have no problem with the whole deal.

Jon [8D]

[3railguy]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Joe Polska

BILLbraskey went back and deleted his posts. Isn't that somewhat suspicious?

Yes. If he was the seller hyping the set, I'm not sure what legal grounds he's on, if any. Legal grounds would be a phony rocket car, if it is phony.

[GPJ68]

Well, considering what this buyer paid for his last two auction wins, this one's a real bargain! Almost $1500 for an empty set box (with damage on one end), and over $300 for another plain brown one. At least he got some trains to go along with the box this time!

Must be nice to be a collector with @%!-loads of money to burn...

[Anonymous]

I took a look at the auction, all the bidders in the bid history & their feedback. I do not see any evidence of shilling. The top 2 bidders appear to be collectors of empty Lionel boxes with more money than common sense.

Still, I do think Bill Braskey was the seller in the auction.

Daniel Lang

[Big_Boy_4005]

QUOTE: Originally posted by 3railguy

Shills are hard to detect. They hide behind screen names. Many times they are legitimate buyers in other auctions but pull a few shill jobs with sellers here and there so they look legitimate.

Hyping the common rocket car with the rare variation on these forums smells like a rat to me.

The winning bidder has two negatives, this is one: "Never paid!4 emails, 1 phone call. Says he'll buy, never did. VERY POOR EBAYER "

We will never know, there is lots of misrepresented, phony, and/or overated junk on ebay and lots of BS and scams to get people LQQkING. My rule is never buy an item over $50 over the net unless I know him well through past dealings.

More good points John, I didn't look carefully at the winner or his feedback. The cool part is that all we have to do is come back to this topic and click the link, and we can find out if the buyer paid, by looking for the seller's feedback. Of course if the winning bid was a shill, the feedback could be fake too, just to cover. On the other hand, why would the seller try to bump a price that was already well over what any of us would have been willing to bid? Both $1000+ bids wouldn't be shills, that would be stupid. At least one was serious!

While we are at all this, let's discuss that 6407 rocket car. You are saying that there are variations, but the copy of Greenberg's that I have doesn't really show any. I'm not just talking about a pocket guide either. I was looking at my full version, though I must admit that my copy is from the early 90's. Still the information on this piece shouldn't have changed that much since it was made back in the early 60's.

My understanding of a variation is that there is something different about the piece that was done at the time of manufacturing. In this case we know that there is nothing different about the car. This is about the rocket all the way. I have seen it with different colored nose cones, including two shades of blue and a gold one. My old Greenberg only has one price listed, all of the other rockets have that good old "NRS", no reported sales, next to them.

We know that this piece was available in 2 different sets, and also seperately. The thing is that the cars sold in the sets have no individual box!!! Finding a box is hard. So it boils down to this:

Was there something different about the rockets packaged with the seperate sale cars, or is it just the box????

Remember, we saw another auction where the box alone went for over $600. Crazy, if you ask me!!!

[3railguy]

QUOTE: Was there something different about the rockets packaged with the seperate sale cars, or is it just the box????

The box for the seperate sale car is rare and worth what the car is worth. Otherwise, there is no difference. So the link he posted was certainly hype because the set does not include the valuable rocket car box.

Empty set boxes are indeed a hot item and they have been for quite a few years now. The set box is probably what sold the trains.

I have Greenburg's guide and Joe Algonzzini's book on Military and space items. According to Algonzinni. There are two known variations. Known mint examples of both have shown up. One without sharpener and one with sharpener. More mint samples showed up without. Apparently when Lionel contracted with Sterling, they did not want the sharpener. But as time went on, Sterling shipped rockets with sharpeners. My thinking is it was more of a hassle for Sterling to produce them both ways. Both Greenburg and Algonzinni do not go into explicit detail over minute variations. I noticed the car in the seperate sale car auction link had a nose that was a darker shade of blue than what you normally see.

The catchy part is Sterling sold these rockets all by themselves as school supplies. The only real difference is the word "astronaut" is printed vertically on the side. This printing is easy to remove and with the right nose color (they came in several colors) viola! A rocket that is identical to the ones sold to Lionel. The variation with a sharpener. It is beleived and proven that many dealers swapped sharpeners during the late 60's and early 70's with the school supply model. That many of the sold called origionals really didn't come with the car. This may explain why more samples show up with the sharpener at train meets according to Algonzinni. My feelings are even if a dealer swapped rockets many moons ago, the Sterling school supply model is a collectible itself.

Sterling sold the rocket tooling to a repro parts maker. This is when the Sterling stamp was removed.

I wouldn't laugh too hard at empty box buyers. They've commanded a healthy premium for some time now. Overall, they've held their value much better than the new engines coming from MTH and Lionel.

I did not accuse Brasky of being a shill. I was convinced he was the seller hyping the set. That does not make him a shill. A shill is a phony bidder. They are very hard to detect. People who buy thousands of dollars in trains from each other are known to buddy up and shill a few auctions. Money is exchanged through ebay and then exchanged back outside of ebay. So shilling is almost impossible to detect unless you have a vast knowledge of who all these people under all these screen names really are and who knows who. You cannot detect it through the seller/buyer history alone. However, I've seen a few laughibly obvious shill auctions on eBay. Is shilling legal? Not really but it is almost impossible for even the FBI to prove. Shilling is as old as prostitution. Shills used to be called "plants".

[Anonymous]

BRASKEY was running a crooked scam. The OGR suckers fell for it but we caught on quickly here.

[Big_Boy_4005]

Relax Joe, I think crooked scam may be a little strong here. I'm also not sure that anybody "fell" for anything. Let's just say that Rich felt that that was an inappropriate posting for his board and took it down. We have to deal with such matters in a different way here.

Thanks for the clarification John, that's kind of what I had gathered from what I read, some of which was between the lines. So, bottom line, there are more rockets than cars out there, by a long shot. A clever person would be cruising garage sales looking for rockets. This makes the empty car actually worth something, and the empty box the best part of all.

So sir, what's your hobby??

I collect EMPTY toy train boxes!

What is the world coming to????[:O][%-)][banghead][(-D][(-D][(-D][swg]

[Big_Boy_4005]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Kooljock1

Big,

If this guy was a shill, and like you I wasn't convinced until he de-listed his posts, he used us for our information. Many actually took time out of their busy schedules to look up their price guides to answer his questions. In that sense, we were used. Other than that, I have no problem with the whole deal.

Jon [8D]

Ah Jon, I think you missed something here. The posts weren't made here at CTT until after the eBay listing was made and the reserve set. We know this because the link to the auction was in the first post. If he had wanted the information for selling purposes, he would have asked much earlier, yes? So, I don't think he used us there.

It isn't uncommon for people to ask "what's it worth" type questions here, it happens about once a week. Being the good natured kind of guys that we are, someone will always share that information with outsiders that manage to find us. The more I think about it, the more I think that's just what Bill was. Of course I have been known to be gullible and naive on occasion.

I seriously doubt that he was a collector, and if you go back to my original conversation with him, you may come away with the same impression. He also posted over on the MR forum, and went in and "cleaned up" there. In that conversation, he was asking about free online price guides. Fortunately there is still a record of these conversations, though some of his parts are missing.

I'm left wondering about the mysterious Bill Braskey. Did Alan's topic scare him off, causing him to delete his posts, or did he have ulterior motives, and felt that his work was done. We may never know. [swg]

Oh, welcome back Daniel, long time no see!!

[Big_Boy_4005]

For the record, the auction started at 16:29 PDT May 24, Bill's first post was the following morning just before 9 AM CDT. He started 5 different topics, 2 here, and 3 on MR. Here are the links.

http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=16379
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=16355
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=16390
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=16353
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=16352

This is an excerpt taken from the main topic here on CTT.

---

Yup Bill, it's creeping up there, but it still isn't too bad. It has been fun to watch this one. You aren't the seller, are you?

no, i had that same set when i was a kid. didnt know it was going to be wrth sokmethin some day. beat the hell out of mine, but had a lot of fun.

That explains a lot Bill. That was the fate of many a set, LOVED TO DEATH. And that is why some sets and pieces are so expensive today. Reduced supply, coupled with people wanting to relive their past. If only we had known.

With 18 hours left it has broken through the $300 level. I'm going to try and watch the final half hour live, it should have more action than most TV shows.

---

Have we wrongly accused Bill?

[Anonymous]

Anyone who thinks BillBraskey was a disinterested observer to the ebay auctions he repeatedly posted about on three different forums as a "newbie" on each, identified the rocket car in his thread (at least on OGR) as "rare," could search ebay prior auctions and post their urls (but still claim he needed help on valuation), and has offered no explanations for his bizarre behavior would probably have voted to acquit OJ. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck you can be pretty sure it's a duck--Bill's a duck.

At a minimum, BillBraskey abused the trust of those generous responders to his evidently fictitious requests for guidance and was deceptive in his relationship to the auction.

[3railguy]

It is obvious Brasky was up to something.

Like Charle Nassau stated on the OGR forum: because of this guy's weird behavior, the car could very well be fake.

[Anonymous]

I'm sorry if I caused such a stir guys. I was legitmately interested in this auction for three reasons:

-I had the same set when I was a kid and thought it would be cool to have another. I no longer have my first set; my brother and I had our fun and beat the heck out of it.

-I just purchased a similar set at a garage sale for $250 at a garage sale and gave it to my brother as a present. I then saw it on Ebay and thought I might buy another for myself.

-I looked around on Ebay and saw how valuable this thing supposedly was. I became curious as to how much this set was worth and wanted to know (and still do) about free online price guides to look this up in the case that I ever find any of it at say a garage sale or flea market, etc.

I posted my questions in a few forums because no one was responding to my forums and no one had answered my question and pointed me to a free online price guide yet. I was just rying to get an immediate response. And my technique wasn't too sophisticated: I am fully able to use copy and paste.

I pulled my threads in the discussion board for two reasons:

-I didn't mean to cause problems and I could see that I had caused one. I didn't like the fact that you were accusing the seller of being dishonest when the seller probably had no idea as to what was being said about him. I didn't think that it was a good idea to continue tra***alking this guy behind his back.

-I would have deleted the thread, but I didn't know how.

As far as the effect of my posting, I probably did hype the sale. Whether that ended up increasing or decreasing the price (with all the tra***alking the seller) of the train set, I have no idea. As far as "shill bidding" goes, I also think that it is B.S. to pull that kind of shenanigan and I do believe that it may be outside the rules.

I would like to continue to periodically use this site to ascertain information from time to time, however, I feel slighlty uncomfortable now. Hopefully, you can all let bygones be bygones and realize that I am not such a bad guy. But you are entitled to your own opinion.

Respectfully submitted,
bb

[Anonymous]

Billbransky
No apology needed. As far as I am concerned the OGR forum is loaded with a lot of self-proclaimed 'eBay Police'. I'm always suspect of those know-it-all vigiliantes.
BillFromWayne
www.modeltrainjournal.com

[Big_Boy_4005]

Bill, ethics and morality are easily lost in cyberspace, therefore TRUST is hard to come by. The fact that you have come back and responded in the face of great criticism shows great courage.

Train collectors can be a very suspecting lot, especially when there is big money at stake. It is all too well known in this community that unscrupulous people are out there waiting to prey on overly trusting or unsuspecting collectors.

Trust has to be earned. I think that has a lot to do with why this episode has ruffled so many feathers. In the future, I think it would be best to steer clear of issues surrounding money and trains together when asking questions or advice.

If you are really interested in talking and learning about trains, WELCOME to the forum. My advice is, PLEASE, buy a price guide!!! That small investment will save EVERYONE a lot of trouble. [swg]

[Anonymous]

Okay Bill, it's all water under the bridge! Welcome to the forum![C):-)]

[3railguy]

Bill, these kinds of things happen. You looked suspicious and we began jumping to conclusions. I guess if anyone owes an appology, its us. If you are not the seller of course. At any rate, you livened up the forums..............LOL

[rlplionel]

I have two questions for BillBraskey. Were you the one who posted the message below in the Lionel Postwar Trains Yahoo! Group using the alias "thedailyb"? And, if so, is it true that you have already purchased a similar set? Seems like a big coincidence that two different folks would be asking about this same set, but I could be wrong.

Message:

Hi,

I recently purchased a Lionel #11341 Train Set with the #1609 Rocket
Car from a garage sale. While scanning Ebay, I found a similar
train set at the following web address:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?
ViewItem&category=4146&item=5900626994

Some of the train sets on this auction look slightly differnet than
mine. Could you guys direct me to some information about how to
tell if your train set is authentic?

Also, the train set on Ebay is going really cheap. I think it is
listed at $80.00. I paid $250 for mine. Did I get ripped off? How
much is my train set worth?

Thanks in advance!

-B

End of message.

[Anonymous]

Thank you, guys! What price guides do you recommend BigBoy and apparently there is nothing online?

[Anonymous]

I just know how to play with trains and have no idea on how to determine condition, etc. I suppose I could read up on it.

[Anonymous]

Bill,
You might want to go over to the OGR forum and explain things as you did here. There was a lot more controversy about this there.

[Big_Boy_4005]

Postng all of that stuff online would be potentially dangerous to the market place, and certainly bad for book sales. Greenberg's is the most widely used, and is published by Kalmbach, the sponsors of this forum. There is a shopping link at the top of the page, and you should find the guides in there, but it may take a little digging, there are a lot of diferent train related books listed.

Another option is TM books and videos. They publish a guide too.

http://tmbooks-video.com/

[Anonymous]

Ah, finally a URL! Thanks Big Boy!

[Big_Boy_4005]

Here's the link for Greenberg's
http://store.yahoo.com/kalmbachcatalog/toy-trains-books.html