Back from Chicago NGRC

Yours Truly and your Famous Klaus have just returned from the 2012 NGRC in St. Charles near Chicago. We had the pleasure to stay with a friend and enjoy his beautiful layout. He was on the Open House Tour List as well and had 2 Open Houses to accommodate all the interest in his layout. The weather was great and everybody had a lot of fun. Contact us if you want to know more about it or want some pictures. Shown above is the water feature  layout part, displaying 3 water features alltogether. Below is "bridges and mountainous terrain".The layout streches alongside the terrace of the house and alongside the added garage, approx 30 yards (rough estimate).

The convention itself drew little interest. In case you remember Denver in 2009, cut the Vendor's Hall attendance by 60 % - for vendors and for attendants/visitors- and you can see the picture. The booth for Märklin/LGB was small and they showed no merchandise to purchase from the booth. Piko's booth was mostly unattended so no information was available anyway. Train-Li with Axel Tillman had a great big booth/showplace but had only track material displayed. A bit sad since he usually has a great variety of spare parts and stuff to offer. USA Trains did not attend. Bachmann's booth was a corner/head-on booth with a focus on kids' toy train (?????). Yours Truly didn't get their concept and obviously others didn't either- but that is just a very personal opinion. Kidman Tree Farm had a great booth/stand showing all his merchandise, was well representing his spare parts and his wonderful bonsai plants for layout gardening in addition to the best loco offerings on the show. And that was it for most of the part. Overall LGB locos and cars were sparsely offered.  Even though it is Yours Truly innerst conviction that the whole LGB market will turn into a collector's market in a very few or couple of years from now - it seems that has already started. And with that said, our future blogs will focus more and more on valuation and value development of LGB locos.

Meanwhile on the spare parts side we learned that Märklin/LGB will not furnish (as in after market spare parts provider) all new locos and mostly none of the old locos with all required spare parts. They will choose at will what will be offered. Also, Bühler has decided to manufacture their motors in China. In addition a new provider does offer similar motors made in China for LGB locos. In case you like to run Original German made motors in your LGB locos, contact Klaus. We have plenty in stock due to the fact that we could lay our hands on a truly big stock of German made Bühler motors last year.


Also NEW: Klaus will start in September to buy/purchase from you damaged/broken/half-burned/flooded or otherwise completely "kaput" LGB locos. We will have more information on that right here as well as on our web site.