|
4/29/08 - Over the years I have found that probably the biggest reason people sell their train collections is because they are moving.
I am no different I guess. As you probably know by now we are moving from Pennsylvania to Florida. I have decided rather than moving my train collection I am going to sell it. Not that it is a huge collection, but it is very high quality and I don't want to take the chance of something getting damaged (especially boxes) during the move.
My collection consists of the best of the best from many of the post and pre war collections I've purchased. Many items in my collection are actually excellent+, like new, and new. My prized possession I guess is the #53 snowplow with the rare correct ‘a'. This is probably one of the best examples of this item anywhere grading absolutely new in a very nice box. There are many other pieces like 773's, GG-1's, F3's, and just a little bit of rolling stock such as 6464 cars, etc. Like I said most are like new to new. I believe everything has the original boxes with maybe one or two exceptions.
You can click here to see some of my collection. I've added many items to it since I made this page, but this will give you an idea of some of the items.
I will be placing the collection little by little on choochooauctions.com and some on ebay. I will start in early May and will make note of the fact that they are from my collection in the auction.
I'm trying not to sound egotistical, but if anyone who wins an item from my collection would like a personal letter from me stating it was in my collection I would be happy to do so.
I've very much loved putting this collection together and am sort of saddened that I am going to be selling it. On the other hand I am very happy that I never need to see snow again!!! I guess I will know how people feel when I pull out of their driveway with my truck and their collection!!
Who knows though I may start another one when we are finally situated in Florida.
4/7/08 - We had a computer crash today which threw us off a little as far as productivity. Jean's computer which we use for many auction functions blew completely today. Thus we were scrambling to send auction emails, etc. Ironically Jean was off today so I guess it was a good day for this to happen. We had to purchase another computer but were able to get most of the data off of the old hard drive so hopefully we'll be 100% back in business in two days. I hate computer problems but they are inevitable so we try to deal with them as fast and efficiently as possible.
I have leased offices in the port at Cape Canaveral. I still don't have a time table of the pending move. I am hoping to stay open here in Pennsylvania through at least most of the Summer, however that could change depending on the sale of property. The store property just went on sale today. I'm not sure how long it will take to sell, but if it does sell earlier than expected we will have to move sooner than hoped. Anyone want to buy a great location for a train store?
2/26/08 - I would like to make a correction to some of the statements I made about consignment last time as I found some facts which are very refreshing!
I stated that Pennsylvania had a law that you needed an auctioneer's license to consign items on auction sites such as ebay and choochooauctions.com. I was wrong, as far as I know at this time it is not law. However there seems to be a lobby from the PAA to require a license to consign and sell them on-line. Their reasoning is a very good one! Fraud has been ramped from companies and individuals taking consignment items such as ebay stores, etc, then suddenly disappearing with the merchandise.
Basically the PAA wants to require a license to businesses and individuals who place consignments on-line. It would not be a full auction license as I indicated last time. It would be a special license. I am all for this as there are too many problems in this area with fraud.
If it stops snowing at some point I am flying south for a week. What started out to be a short trip for a little golf and a condo association meeting has turned into something else!! I will be buying a collection in Florida and another one in Virginia. I was planning on flying back, but now obviously I will be driving a truck. And that is fine with me!! The bonus in this is that I will be able to transport the other two collections I bought last month in Florida and had to leave there. Finally we'll get them back here to snowy Pennsylvania where they belong!
The last month we have been inundated with train collection lists. I am working on them as fast as I can, but obviously I am behind. This is a very good sign though as a couple of months ago we were very dry as to inventory. We go through it so fast that sometimes I can't buy enough!!
Our business has been stationed here in Erie, PA now for over 25 years at the same location. A couple of months ago my wife and I realized that she can retire this year. It's hard to believe but it has been over 30 years now since she started teaching. This led to other thoughts because we do own a condo in Florida. To make a long drawn out, extremely stressful story short, we have decided to move to Florida. We will be moving Train City, Inc. to Florida as well later this year.
I'm still in shock by our decision because as we get further along into the process I realize more and more that I'll be leaving my home town and many friends, which is a little emotional.
If things go as planned this should not affect business until around mid Summer when we will have to shut down operations for 4 to 6 weeks. Although we will not be able to place auctions during that time, I will be buying as always. We'll need inventory for when we open in Florida. Our two web sites choochooauctions.com and traincity.com will stay open throughout the process since they are not physically located in Erie, PA. Anyone will be able to buy and sell there. We just won't be able to while we are moving.
Our business will be located in Central Florida on the East coast near Cape Canaveral, around 50 minutes due East of Orlando Airport. (A little over an hour from Disney World.)
To be honest I'm not sure if we are going to have a storefront or not although I want a small storefront if at all possible.
And as always even though we will be in Florida we will travel anywhere to purchase a nice sized train collection!
I should have more information about our move next time and will continue to fill you in on our progress through this enormous task ahead of us!
1/27/08 - It has been a busy week as I have purchased a couple of collections in Florida and another nice one up here in the north just yesterday. Unfortunately the two Florida collections weren't big enough to transport by truck, but too big and bulky to ship back to myself, so they will have to stay in Florida until someone in the south sells me a large collection so that I can transport them up at the same time.
Recently I have learned that the Pennsylvania Auctioneers Association is causing havoc in the train world. Actually I suppose it is possible other state associations are doing the same thing. As I understand it they are trying to enforce a rule that states that consigned items cannot be placed on auction sites such as ebay without having an auctioneers licence.
I have mixed feelings about this subject.
The state of Pennsylvania has two ways you can obtain an auctioneers license. First is to apprentice with a licensed auctioneer for two years then pass the state test. The second is to go to a college for auctioning, complete the course, then take the state test.
For most of us who are already working or established in business the first option isn't really feasible. The second is more attractive and I've actually considered doing so until I found that there are only two colleges where you can study auctioning in Pennsylvania and they are both on the other side of the state.
I believe the PAA makes it purposely difficult to obtain an Auctioneers licence especially for people already established in business or out in the working world or who live on this side of the state for that matter. It really doesn't look like the courses are all that difficult. I have seen some ‘professional' auctioneers in this state that look and act as if they didn't graduate from high school let alone a college course of study! Last year I was at an auction where the auctioneer started insulting the crowd. I thought that was a smart way to get them to up their bids, don't you?
So what is the big deal if Joe Blow places some items on ebay for a friend? Well from the PAA's point of view, those are items that should have been placed at a live auction. In essence they are afraid that ebay is taking business away from them. And they are right. But then again ebay has taken business away from many, not just auctioneers! Only those that chose to try to work within the system haven't been hurt too badly by ebay.
I hate consignment myself. The worst thing you could do when liquidating your collection is place it on consignment with a friend or business for that matter.
There are so many horror stories concerning consignment it isn't really even funny. I doubt very much that your good friend who offered to sell your items on consignment is going to be much of a friend once he loses the money he got for your collection.
This actually happened with a person I purchased a collection from recently. He told me he had left a number of big ticket train items at a dealer friend who was to sell them. Evidently they were sold and the money was put in a safe place. When he went to pick up the money, mysteriously the money had disappeared. I could tell you a number of similar stories about consignment, but I'll stop there. It should be pretty evident that unless the person you are dealing with is a professional dealer or a professional auctioneer that it isn't a good idea. The key word here is professional with a good reputation.
Personally I very rarely take consignments, however I have and will continue to do so. Although I would much rather purchase outright. The only reason I've consigned in the past is because it was inventory I wasn't particularly familiar with. Then it makes sense for me. But I am sure consignment items have constituted much less than one hundredth of a percent of our sales over the years.
A real good friend of mine recently told me that another friend of mine had consigned some trains to him. The funny thing is that my other friend had also inquired about selling the same trains to me outright. Ironically I guess consignment affects everyone!
Even so, I would love to hear how the PAA intends to enforce their ‘no consignment without an auctioneers licence'! Are they going to form the auctioneer police?
The collection I bought yesterday is a honey! Make sure you check out both traincity.com (for new items), and choochooauctions.com over the next several days.
And last but not least. Even with this collection we still do need inventory. We are particularly looking for larger collections, and are paying more to get them. Don't consider consigning your trains. First of all it is illegal! Sell to a professional dealer. You won't regret it because you will receive your money before your collection leaves your possession. It is a much more secure transaction and just makes sense. Go to a casino if you want to gamble!
12/27/07 - We have been pretty busy and that is why I haven't updated this page for a while. It is amazing how busy it gets around here. Today was particularly busy, but that is because Jean was off for a couple of days and we are more or less playing catch up. I am very happy with the way Fedex has worked out. I wasn't sure what to expect, but we've had very few glitches in getting used to their system. You should be receiving email notices when we prepare your shipment. If you don't, please email us and let us know. The only way we can't email you with the shipping info is if you haven't provided us with an email address. On January 1st we will be incorporated. We will be known as Train City, Inc. There are several reasons for this change. I am still 100% owner, so other than the name and changing our book keeping around a little, everything should still work about the same. Our inventory is low right now. Many years it gets this way mainly because the Christmas season sucks it away. We are trying to re-stock and are paying generous finder's fees as well as higher buying prices right now. If you have trains for sale, or know of someone who does, this might be a great time to contact us. Feel free to call me at 814.833.8313 (ask for Charlie), or email me at trainman@traincity.com. Thanks to all of you who bought or sold trains from us this past year. We sincerely appreciate your business and hope this coming new year is a great one not only business wise, but more importantly personally for you and your families. By the way, if you didn't do business with us this past year, may you rot in hell. (No, just fooling!!!) Doesn't matter if you do business with us or not. Really doesn't matter what your religion is or where you are from. Doesn't matter if you are rich or poor. Doesn't matter what race you are. Happy New Year from the bottom of my heart and all of us at Train City!
12/01/07 - Hello, hello, hello!! Sorry this has been so long. To say the least we've been a little busy here in choochooland!! We are in need of inventory. We are particularly looking for large collections. We will pay a nice finder's fee for anyone helping us purchase trains as always. If you happen to see anything that I might have not already have been offered, please direct them our way or let us know. We pay more when our inventory is on the low side. Speaking of buying trains, I just had an experience in our store that I'd like to share with you. Truthfully I try my best to be a gentleman when it comes to business. I like to deal with our customers buying or selling with understanding and respect. But sometimes a nut is let loose in this world and I just had one in my store! I had been talking to him on the phone about coming up and selling me some trains. We need inventory so I was looking forward to it and was ready to give him a good offer for the trains he had. Actually I did give him a good offer! I knew I was in trouble though when he picked up the 52 fire car and said something to the affect of ‘well look at this car, it's a $450.00 car if it was in a little better condition.' I looked at the car, saw that the roof was disconnected from the body, the generator was missing and I tried to explain that we had to deal with reality. And then he went on to a couple of other examples like these three cars are worth $600.00!!! Well the three cars he pointed out were worth maybe $200.00. Possibly had they been new in the boxes they would have been worth that sum!! OK so I took his list and went to my office, doing some work on the collection. Took me a long time actually because I wanted to make certain I gave him the best offer I possibly could. Returning I gave him an offer of which he immediately refused, although he wanted to sell me three MPC cars. I told him all or nothing. I was at least the third person he had contacted and it was apparent to me as he was leaving that probably unless my offer had been 12K or something like that he was just fishing for free info. Or he was in an out of body experience and was hoping for dancing candy canes. (Wow that's heavy! LOL) I did mention to him in as polite a way as at all possible that possibly instead of wasting people's time he should sell them on ebay himself. (I really did good. I was a little upset and I did it politely!) Seems like I've had a lot of tire kickers lately. I'm not sure why, maybe it's my karma or something! I am buying a nice sized collection in a couple of weeks, but now we have a nice warehouse and I'd like to fill it up, so please if you know of any non-tire kickers, please let me know! One of these days (I keep telling myself this) we are going to update our traincity.com tour. We have a completely new staff now except for Jean and me. Well let me mention who's working now. And I might add that this staff now is the best, the most fun to work with, and most productive we have ever had. Jean is the auction administrator. Many of you know her. She's been here for several years and sometimes doubles as the office manager. Sometimes she is the collector too. You don't want to owe us money because she can be very convincing if you know what I mean!!! John is my son and handles most of the ebay auctions. He is more or less learning the business so that at some point several years down the road I can retire gracefully. John graduated from West Virginia U and is actually at the Pitt, WV game today. He's hoping the West Virginia wins and goes to the national championship. I'm hoping too for his sake, because he is also a Buffalo Bills fan and you know how much suffering and disappointment he's had rooting for those Bills!!! Lonny is the chief packer. He's been doing a great job and fits into the staff excellently!! He is actually one of the reasons we switched to Fedex which seems to be working out well. Mary is one of our store clerks and helps with shipping. She's really, really a nice person to work with. Even though she makes mistakes every once in a while. (I never make mistakes! LOL) Just fooling she makes very few mistakes. We have a bell in the store. Well we ring it when someone makes a mistake. (Actually I don't, the staff started this.) It is so funny working in my office and hearing that bell go off. I cringe!! Ebbie has been with us about the same amount of time Lonny and Mary have give or take a month. Ebbie loves trains. As a matter of fact since he has started working here I think he's bought more trains than I have paid him. I like that!!! There is always room for another train nut! I promise I will have pictures soon. Give or take a couple of years. Well I had better get back to work. I hope you and yours have a very merry holiday and a fabulous new year. Hopefully I'll be able to write something here before that time comes as I have a lot to say!
10/23/07 - Hello everyone. Hope all you that went to York had a great time. I almost went, but couldn't get away. I'd like to share a story with you that is so unbelievable, I am still scratching my head that it actually happened. OK, before I start that story I have to say that we are back at full staff. We are now shipping packages either the same day or one day behind. And I think you will see that the packaging is much better thanks to our staff who are once again taking the attitude, pack it right! A couple of months ago we shipped a package to a good customer of ours who when he received it told us that the box was received with a huge gash in it that had been taped shut probably by UPS. When he opened the box he found that six items were missing out of the box. Of course he contacted us about it and I filed a claim with UPS knowing that there would be no problem with missing items. A week later I received a call from Crawford Insurance who is actually the insurance company that by all rights is UPS's insurance. They insure themselves, but through their own insurance company. At first the lady was polite and asked me questions about the package. Around half way through the conversation her tone turned and she said that she needed to know exactly how the package was packed or she wouldn't be able to pay the claim. That sort of threw me into shock as I originally had thought this would be a no problem claim since the box had obviously been almost ripped in half by UPS and then taped back together. I tried to explain that I didn't pack the box, and the person who did was no longer with our company. And besides I asked what does packing have anything to do with missing 6 items out of a box because the box was ripped open in UPS's system. They had the box, it was corrugated as they require. This frustrating call upset me greatly especially since the woman started to act more like a gestapo officer than a professional insurance claim person as the conversation evolved. I was mad. I was actually trembling when I called my UPS representative who I talked to and told her my story. The next day she dropped by my office and we discussed it further. She did a trace in their overgoods section and actually found four of the missing cars. So then at her advice I filed another claim for the other two items of which since the total I claimed was under $100.00 I was confident that this claim would go through and the problem would go away. That was around a month ago, and I haven't heard from my UPS representative since then, so I have to assume that claim was denied as I told her I did not want to talk with that nasty claims agent again. We've been with UPS now for well over 20 years and have built up a business that started with a little UPS sign in the window when we needed them to stop for our one or two packages to at least lately shipping 20 to 50 boxes a day. My current UPS bill for September is $4,500.00. That's over $50,000.00 yearly that I am now paying UPS. And they can't pay an $80.00 claim that was clearly their fault in the first place? Either UPS is missing some bolts up there in the head or they are about as arrogant a company as any I've ever heard of. Basically what they have done is refused to pay an $80.00 claim to lose a very long time customer who pays them over $50,000.00 a year and growing almost every year. And lose me they have. They really gave me no choice. Let me clarify that in that we are going to temporarily (at least) go with Fedex ground. I've told a couple of people about this and they were actually happy with my decision. I didn't realize this but I understand now that Fedex ground delivers on Saturday's as well. At any rate we will start out with five packages a day for the next week or so, then if everything seems to work well in their system, we will make a complete change. I told our UPS driver yesterday and his initial comment was, ‘good for you'! He also said that UPS will not care that we are leaving. I know we are probably but a speck in their system, but in my opinion that is stupidity on their part. They place the stupid commercials with the guy drawing on the board to gain new customers, but yet they don't care that they lose long time customers to their relatively new competition! This isn't the only reason we are leaving UPS. The main reason however is related as they throw those packages around like a football. This is partly because they are just too busy being the number one package carrier. It is time for a change, and hopefully this works out with Fedex ground. At least I hope they take better care of our packages and treat their customers with a little more respect. I've always tried my best to hold down costs and have avoided like the plague to raise our shipping costs. I want you to know I am not raising shipping costs at this moment, but we are doing a study to see how much of a deficit we have in that area. This year not only UPS but all the carriers went to a system where they factor in the dimensions of packages and of course raised their rates and the famous fuel surcharges. Where last year we stayed pretty much even with shipping costs, this year we are falling behind. And that is not even considering handling costs. If it was up to me I'd lower our shipping and handling costs that you pay. But unfortunately then comes reality. I'm not sure where this is going to end. Unfortunately they know they have us who buy and sell through mail order or the Internet by the cabooses if you know what I mean. Now some companies can avoid raising prices of their products to cover shipping costs. However since most of our sales are generated through auctions, that would be impossible. I don't know where this is going. I don't know what it will cost to ship items say 10 years from now. I wouldn't be surprised if shipping charges were double by then. I think UPS and others are simply playing their hand and charging what the market will bear. It will be interesting to see what happens. Possibly shipping prices will rise to the point that people start buying at train shows again!! I do have a feeling that we will be forced to raise our shipping and handling charges probably sooner than later. I know we have lost some customers due shipping costs. I hope you understand though that this is not a way of us making extra revenue. Our shipping and handling structure has always been at a deficit to us especially when you factor in handling. Hopefully most people understand and believe me when I make that statement.
10/6/07 - Busy is not a word that can describe right now what is going on at Train City. It is way beyond that and actually driving us nuts. However I guess being too busy is better than not busy enough, so thank you to all who have contributed to our problem! Recently we have noticed that the number of people who are accumulating massive amounts of winning auctions and having us ship them all at once has grown considerably. That is a practice that I would much rather avoid if possible. I know this can be more convenient for people to do it this way. However the bottom line is that this more or less slows our system down. We have always tried to bend over backwards to accommodate customers. And of course this is the way we do business. However it has come to the point where we have to take some measures to alleviate this problem as much as possible. Each and every one of our (traincity) auctions states. Please do not bid if you don't have the funds to pay for this auction.' That basically means that if you don't have the money to buy the item at the time you are bidding on the auction, please don't bid. We have run into some problems with people actually holding off from paying us for auctions until they can get the funds. This is aggravating and we will not allow this to happen anymore. We are trying to sell trains. We do not want to get into the collection business! Please, if you can't pay for the auction within seven days of the auction ending, don't bid. It's that simple. We do not want to have to re-auction items, and we particularly don't want to have to ban people from bidding on our auctions, but we have, and we will if this practice persists. On the brighter side the vast majority of you tend to pay extremely quickly. Thanks so much for that! Many of you may realize that traincity.com has a shopping cart system. It doesn't get used nearly as much as our auction site. A couple of years ago I tried to get more use out of the shopping cart system by allowing people to combine auctions with their cart orders and receive a cart discount to the entire order. This never really worked the way that I had wanted it to, so I am eliminating that offer. After all an auction is the price you want to pay for an item. Why should we discount it further? So consider this policy scrubbed. You are welcome to combine orders however the discount will now apply only to the cart order and auction prices will not be affected. I seem to be grumbling today, and I am truly sorry. But here's another one that I think everyone will be able to relate to.... I've been doing business with the Kalmbach publishing for a very long time. I've advertised in every issue of ‘Classic Toy Trains' since the first issue. I advertised for years even before ‘CTT' was even thought of. I consider the Kalmbach company to be one of the finest and has served both train collectors and dealers very well over the years. However, (and I know you knew there had to be a however coming sometime), their price guides suck. I was trying to find a word that is more diplomatic, but to be honest with you I just can't think of a better word. I received the new 2008 Lionel Trains pocket guide and the 2008 American Flyer pocket guide around three weeks ago. Now keep in mind I am really busy and haven't had much of a chance to look into this book in much detail. Last year you might remember that in the modern section of the book instead of having the pricing columns described as Excellent and New, they used Good and Excellent. I suppose this shows you the vast knowledge the publisher of this book has. (OK I make mistakes too, so let's overlook that one and go on to this years problems.) Making mistakes is one thing, but manipulating data to conform to a certain number of pages is a completely different thing. First of all, I don't know where they are getting their prices. I actually talked to the publisher last year and he mumbled something about a formula they use. Formula??? What??? What ever happened to actual sales? OK let's get past this one. Wait a second I"m starting to hyperventilate. I have to go do some yoga to calm down. Just a second I'll be back to finish this in just a second.......... ................ OK, I feel a little better now. Now what was I talking about......... Oh crap, the damn pocket guides.... OK, I'm going to be OK. I know I can get through this without having an attack of some kind. Well, I'm not sure if I am the only one that noticed this, but last year's book had 320 pages. OK, so you would think that maybe this year's issue would have maybe 330 pages because you know new items added by Lionel, things like that. Well it turns out this new edition with more data than before has 319 pages. How could this be we all ask??? Well first of all (and they don't really tell you this or explain why) they left out the entire large scale section. So if you want information on Lionel G gauge, well you have been orphaned with no real reason. But worse, throughout this new Lionel book there are individual items missing. I have not purposely tried to find missing items, but in the two weeks I have been using it for reference (stupid me) I have found the following numbers missing from this book that had been included in the 2007 edition. 9544, 9119, 6108, 9733, 6438. OK that is only five items, but I am sure there are more and maybe many more items missing. So if they can't go over 320 pages instead of doing the logical thing and maybe making a pre-war/post-war book separately from the modern book, they decided to eliminate important data from their book. I've said this before and I will repeat myself. This book is an afterthought. Accuracy means absolutely nothing in this book. This book is about simply making money the easiest and most convenient way that Kalmbach can possibly do so. I sell these books in our store and I almost sent them back in disgust. As a matter of fact I may still do that. And last but not least, we offer a free Price Guide on both traincity.com and choochooauctions.com. This has nothing to do with trying to promote our guides. Unfortunately we aren't publishers and although the pricing may be more accurate, there is missing data, but that is explained in the guide. And besides it's are free for goodness sake! Kalmbach is charging $17.95 for basically garbage. I hope someone from Kalmbach reads this little rant and maybe starts thinking about doing a better job for next year or just doing us all a favor and cease production. I still think they are a great company. I just think they need to re-evaluate if they want a quality price guide that is accurate. They are doing little service in continually publishing garbage year after year. Whoops my veins are sticking out again. I'm going to go and do some more yoga!
9/15/07 - Well things are starting to smooth out here at Train City finally. I do apologize to anyone who was affected with our recent staffing problems. We have hired new personnel who are working out great! This all started in June when Kathy left for personal reasons. She was nice enough to give notice and helped us for around three weeks which was nice. We hired two additional people. One had some personal problems of her own and after only a couple of days she just failed to show up. The other I had to fire. So at that point we were left with Peter. Jean helped in the store as much as she could. And we hired Mary who (cross my fingers) is still with us and doing very well. Last week to make matters worse Peter quit without notice and we were left hanging once again. Some of you might remember Joyce who worked for us for years. She came in and helped out during this difficult time. This past Monday Ebbie started and is working out great. Now I have only one more person to hire for packing when we are really busy. Hopefully I have already found him.
For the first time in quite a while we are caught up on packing, and we should be back to normal for the most part from now on. It is nice to have a little breather and be able to update this log. Tomorrow will be better though as it's supposed to be sunny and I'm going golfing. You know I don't mind working extra hours due to our staffing problems, but when it starts to affect my golf game, well, that's hurtful!!
8/30/07 - I have been meaning to start a page that is sort of a blog that I can ramble about what is happening at Train City. I haven't felt comfortable about doing it on the front page of our auction site mainly because sometimes I go on rambling and rambling about things that probably shouldn't be said and I am trying my best to keep choochooauctions.com as professional as possible. On the other hand if you are familiar with the home page of traincity.com I have usually been a little more personal. I actually miss that type of communication with our customers and others who view our pages. I've actually had some requests for me to go back to the traincity.com format. So here it is! We will make this sort of a blog which I can vent when there is news or better yet no news at all! You may or may not know we have had some staffing problems. Kathy quit in June or so and since then we have been trying to replace her. We've had a couple of bad experiences in replacing her, but I think we are on the right track now. Peter is still with us and doing a great job. Of course Jean the auction administrator and collector. (If you owe us money you don't want to mess with Jean better known as Guino!) My son John is working out great. He is busy learning the business in mainly listing items on ebay for us. John is a Buffalo Bills fan. I'm not talking that he just likes the Bills a little. No.. he likes them a lot. So last Friday he pulled me up to a pre-season game. Well actually I think the game is secondary. Actually the tail gate party is what he loves. OK I had never been to a tail gate party before. So we get there and there is this old Pinto sitting there with all this food cooking in grills on the car's hood. There is grease streaming down the hood of the car. There is a bowling ball sitting on a little table and a sign, 'Bill's best fan'. If you are a Bill's fan you know where I was. It turns out that the bowling ball is used to pour shots of liquor into the thumb hole. You drink the shot down, then you drop the bowling ball on the ground. If the hole is not straight up facing the sky you have to drink another penalty shot until you get it right. No I only drank beer thanks! I had to drive home. At any rate now I know my son is certifiably nuts. Well a Buffalo Bill nut. We had fun though. It's just a little different. Myself being a Pittsburgh Steeler fan, I still had fun! OK back to whatever it was I was talking about... Oh yea... We now have Mary who has taken Kathy's place. She seems to be working out great and we are happy to have found her. We are now adding a position for a designated packer. I have already found someone and he will start Tuesday. So it looks like we are back in business. I'll tell you it has been not fun for us in this transition, but I think in another month or so we will be stronger than ever. I've just purchase two sizeable collections this past week. One from New Jersey and the other from Michigan. We also have a lot of items left over from previous collections that we are trying to clean out. They will be in the form of junk type lots on both choochooauctions.com and ebay. Well, I hope everyone has a great Labor Day weekend. I hate Labor Day because it means Summer is just about over. And I'm just starting to play some good golf. Oh well there is always Florida. And that brings up another sore subject! Why haven't I received any good train collection lists from Florida lately. It was a year ago since I purchased my last Florida collection. I'll be in Florida in September and November if anyone wants to give me a sensible reason to to down. Oh yea I'll be there in December too, but that is designated an official golf trip, so under no circumstances known to man will I buy any trains in December. Well, maybe I could extend my trip a day or two if you twisted my arm. Otherwise I plan on golfing a lot and doing a lot of other things that I probably shouldn't be doing! (They have floating casinos down there!)
Charles Siegel (traincity) |