Charlie's Blog
8/26/22 - Hope you are having a great summer. We have been cleaning up some policies that cause problems for us and you. Here are three that we need to mention.. Please read as these may affect you.
We cannot hold orders for pick-up for more than 7 days any longer, even if paid. This is causing problems for us that involve mistakes, etc. by staff. If you have prior items that are paid for please pick them up as soon as possible. Future orders will be billed for shipping if not picked up in a timely manner. This has become somewhat of a big problem for us so there will be no exceptions.
When you pay via paypal or credit card, please do so in your invoice on choochooauctions.com. Our system notifies us immediately after you pay through our website and we can then get your order packed and shipped in a timely manner. Otherwise say if you pay directly through paypal, we won’t know you paid and your order could receive no action without you saying something.
As a consideration to our customers (your choice), we will now combine an unlimited number of auctions within 7 days. This way you only have to pay for one invoice if this is your preference. Please note though more than 8 items may require more than one package.
3/30/22 - Boy it has been a while! As you may have noticed we have been sorta dry with new inventory. That will change very soon as we have a couple of very large collections coming in! Exciting news as I would much rather be train poor than cash rich!
Other than that things are going well with my new life as a one arm man. No problems at all and a couple of weeks ago I was told I am now cancer free. Best news I have had in a while!
Charlie
11/24/21 - A very happy Thanksgiving to you! John just got back in a huge truck filled with two really interesting deals we purchased up North.
The first collection came from Michigan and has high quality Lionel items, both post war and modern. I have worked on some of the collection and some very nice trains. High quality. There will be much more appearing on this site! The second collection came out of Virginia and we did something different this time. We bought it without an inventory list, so we aren't sure how this one will turn out but there are so many shipping boxes, we are pretty sure we will be ok even if it is all junk. But I do see some good Williams engines, MTH just looking from my desk. At any rate, sort of a storage wars deal. We'll see how it turns out!
And I believe we are buying another collection that is West of here soon. Most collections are North of us so we welcome Florida collections which cost less to transport!
At any rate we are entering hard core train season. Hope you enjoy it and have a fabulous turkey day!!
Charlie
11/18/21 - Thanks for the look on our new site. We will be adding new items almost every day. Although we have been working on an American Flyer collection recently, there will be Lionel, MTH, and many other interesting collections coming soon!
10/28/21 - Somewhat of a dark post. I wanted to get through my surgery recovery before posting this.
On October 8 I had major surgery. I lost my right arm to cancer. I had been fighting the fight for 11 years. It finally came to the point that it would be necessary to amputate my arm.
Believe it or not I am doing pretty well today. Getting better every day. I hope to be 100% soon.
Had to survive this. I love buying and selling electric trains too much. Two armed or one arm. What does it matter?
10/14/21 - Hey last week I had some serious surgery. That's the reason there have been no new auctions since last week. I am starting to feel better. Hope to be back soon.
Charlie
10/3/21 - I've noticed some strange activity especially on ebay lately. I don't know, maybe I am wrong but do a bunch of dealers seem to be abandoning auctions and going with fixed price sales instead?
I've been trying to digest why this is happening and have developed a theory.
But first, before getting into that let me tell you about a incident that happened recently with a former customer of ours that was completely bazaar which may be related.
A dealer who had been purchasing from us for some time sort of lost it with us. Actually I wasn't even involved with this as at the time it had involved ebay auctions which Laura and John were mainly involved with.
One day John came up to me and told me that this so called dealer had given us 42 bad feedbacks on ebay. (Evidently he had been saving them up to do this intentionally to us.)
This guy was buying trains from us on choochoo then ebay, then place the items back on ebay in a fixed price sale at an astronomical price. Three, four, five time his cost. There really is nothing wrong with that except for I just find it to be a very sleazy way to do business. And I believe ebay is big enough of a market that people actually buy the grossly overpriced items.
So as I understand it Laura was trying to get in touch with him and no matter how she tried he would not respond. This went on for a while and unknown to me, John froze his ebay account in hopes he would respond.
Finally John told me about it and I was shocked. I still don't know what happened to cause this behavior. I feel bad, but I guess he isn't going to respond and that is that! I would have loved to have talked to him to find out why this happened in the first place!
I only mention him because it is baffling. But he is an example of fishing on ebay which obviously is not illegal, but possibly somewhat unethical.
I feel for the people who actually buy items that are grossly overpriced. I would think that most people that make a practice of doing this would not offer a return privilege.
My point is be careful when buying on the internet.
We actually offer a free price guide which could be helpful to fight against people playing games like high pricing. The link is below in the footer of this page.
But actually my theory has nothing to do with price gouging. I'm thinking most dealers on ebay are good guys. Most likely the reason is because when all is said and done on an auction they have 15-20% in fees that they have to cover. You just can't cover that much necessarily in an auction. We found that on ebay we were paying thousands of dollars to ebay every month. Tough to make a profit doing that.
One other thing. Ebay saw our situation with the bad feedback and deleted every single piece of fake, disgusting feedback our former customer left us. I am thinking maybe he was drunk when he gave us that feedback. Extremely nasty thing to do.
8/23/21 - Trying to put things together better on our new site. I've often wondered how many people actually read my blogs. I mean it is many times boring content and sometimes doesn't even have anything to do with electric trains for heavens sake!
But still I am usually trying to take my frustrations, ideas, and opinions out on you. And you should read because is is written.
No, seriously I do enjoy writing sometimes when I get the time. Wish I knew how to write!
I once wrote an article for Classic Toy Trains which I thought was pretty good. I submitted it to them and got a pretty big surprise in that one of their editors called me and wanted to change every word and sentence in the article.
I thought about it and just came to the conclusion that the revised article didn't say what I wanted it to. After all I graduated from Harvard with a BS in English writing. And if you believe that boy do I have a Florida land deal for you!
Actually I graduated from Edinboro University with a BS degree in Music Education. Sometimes I now sing in the shower or while playing with trains.
So my point is..................... What was I talking about? Oh yea, the article. Well I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all so I pulled it and told them I would submit it to O Gauge Railroading.
Guess what. They published the article as is. I got many comments that they knew less about the subject of the article after reading it than before. But they liked the pictures!!
So if you got this far you really are a glutton for punishment huh?
At any rate I sincerely hope you like our new site. I know it is different from our old site, but the more you use it, the more you will like it. It is so easy to use once you get used to it.
I hope to write more in this blog as time goes on. And I hope you like the icons to give you more options to use our site. My daughter Kathy is a graphics designer, and when she saw the original icons that I had found she immediately said 'bad dad' and made theses for me. She does good work!!
Boy when we used Ebay exclusively for those four months truthfully I really missed having our own site. Very, very glad to be back!
Stand by for some more great deals!
Charlie
