| Nolan,
You have to keep things in prospective. When I worked in the local hobby shop in the late 1950s, we had PFM United USRA 2-8-2s, 4-6-2s and NKP 2-8-4s that sold for $49.95. At that time, I was making 85 or 90 cents an hour! Even after graduating from college in 1966, my starting salary at Electro-Motive Division of GM was $625.00 per month. You could buy a decent new automobile for $2000 - 3000. My wife an I purchased our first home in 1968 for $28500.00. It was a brand new 3 bedroom, 2 bath house in the Chicago suburbs. Wages and prices usually go hand in hand. The big change is technology. As someone else noted, those $50 PFM models looked nice, ran ok, but had no electronics, flywheels or even lights. They were strictly DC open frame motors and didn’t even come with couplers, just a mounting pad. Today’s models maybe brass or other materials that have been developed, have DCC control, sound, sometimes smoke , all kinds of controllable lights, highly detailed, road specific and run beautifully. So, while today’s HO models cost from $150 - 600 or more, the modeler gets a lot more right out of the box. Proportionally, today’s models probably don’t really cost much more, but you do get a lot more and kit bashing isn’t as necessary.
Bill Barber Gravois Mills, MO
Re: Dave Beck's HO Scale S3 4-6-2 model. From: Richard TownsendDate: Thu, 30 Jul 2020 21:36:35 PDT Not absolutely as expensive but at the time they certainly were expensive. I remember reading the articles in amazement at how casually he hacked up expensive brass engines.
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