Shopping an estate sale for trains

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , ,

My girlfriend loves shopping at yard sales, flea markets, thrift stores, and basically everywhere people look for bargains.

I’m not into that all that much. I’m a guy. So I just asked her to keep an eye out for tools for me if she happened to be garage sale-ing.

This week she found an estate sale with tools and trains. It started at 7:30 this morning. So I dragged myself out of bed to go.The description said "electric trains." Usually when people say electric trains, they mean old American Flyer, Lionel or Marx, because that was what those companies used to put on their boxes. "Model trains" usually means HO or N scale. Nothing against those, but they’re not my thing. And besides, you can buy those anywhere.

When I got there, it was right at 7:30. It looked like they’d started early because there were lots of people there. I noticed a lot of people glancing at the trains but not staying long. I took a look. The glossy brightly-colored enameled bodies instantly told me it was pre-war stuff. I looked at the prices. $85 for a refrigerated car. $28 for a gondola. $24 for a caboose. These guys had gone to the library and looked up the values of the cars. I know because the guy told me so.

"Are these prices about right? I went to the library and looked them up."

I explained to him that the Greenberg price guides tend to be skewed in favor of the east coast. Prices are higher there, partly because the cost of living is higher out there than in the midwest, and partly because there’s a bigger following over there. Lionel and Marx were both New York companies. Gilbert was a New Haven company. Flyer was a Chicago company before selling out to Gilbert, but that was prior to 1938. There’s more appeal to the stuff on the east coast because you find people whose grandfather or great uncle worked for one of those companies, or some other connection.

What I didn’t tell him (but should have) was that those prices are for mint condition. And while his items were in nice shape, they were anything but mint. Most of them would grade to excellent, or very good. Stepping down a grade knocks anywhere from 10%-50% off the price of the item.

The cars also weren’t 100% original. At some point the couplers on the cars had been replaced with Lionel post-war couplers. That’s an upgrade, which is probably why the original owner had done it, and whoever did the upgrade did a good job, but from a collector’s point of view, it lowers the value. It’s an advantage to people who run the trains, but someone like me isn’t going to pay extra for it.

The prewar freight set that was priced at $137 total at this sale probably would have been priced closer to $75 at Marty’s Model Railroads, frankly. Marty probably would have given him $40 total.

He also had two passenger sets. They would have graded out to Good, possibly only Fair. They, too, were priced at mint.

There was a nice prewar engine. I forget the number. It was priced at $250 for the engine and tender. That’s a fair price if it’s a whistling tender, if the engine is in perfect working order, and the paint is good. The paint was really good on the engine. But it probably at least needed a lube job. With no way to test the engine, there was no way I was going to pay $250 for it.

I spied a couple of postwar Marx diesels, priced at $50. It was an A-B pair, with the B unit being a dummy. A quick examination revealed the front had been cracked and re-glued. Diesels tend to go for more than steam engines the same age, but in that condition, and untested, a Marx should only go for $20.

I also spied a couple of pairs of Marx metal switches. They were the electric variety. I’m told metal Marx switches were prewar. I don’t know about that, since all of the metal ones I’ve ever seen were in a lot with postwar equipment. Maybe they were put together after the war with old parts. Marx was known for that. At any rate, the Marx metal switches are highly desirable. The later plastic switches sit higher than your track, so you have to shim your track for the locomotives to run right. These don’t. Also, the design allows Marx and American Flyer engines with thicker wheels than Lionels to pass through them. So a metal Marx switch lets you run any train you want. And unlike the Lionels of the same vintage, they run off a fixed 18 volts, not from the track, so they tend to work more reliably.

The only Lionel switch that compares is the Lionel 1121, which Lionel didn’t make for very long. It’s easier to make the 1121 self-tending, but in all other regards the Marx is better.

The switches were priced at $10 per pair, including the original boxes, control panels and wires (but the wires need to be replaced). That’s not a fabulous price, but it’s fair. I paid $10 per pair for some plastic Marx manual switches at Marty’s back in December. Marx switches tend to sell for $10 per pair on eBay, but then you have to deal with shipping.

So I bought the two pair of switches, and nothing else.

Later, my girlfriend told me they wouldn’t take her check. So I guess it’s a good thing I only got the switches. I wouldn’t have been able to get any more even if I’d wanted to, because I only had $24 in cash on me.

It was a mild disappointment. I took a quick look at the tools and saw the same thing. Prices were very close to what I would pay at Sears. Only at Sears, I’d get a warranty on it, and if I bought $100 worth of stuff, I’d get a $5 off coupon on my next purchase.

It was a mild disappointment. She was disappointed too. I’m going to assume it wasn’t typical. She told me it wasn’t a very good estate sale.

I think I’ll go back tomorrow afternoon, towards the end, and see if the trains are still there. Maybe then he’ll be looking to deal. Marty can charge the prices he does because he’s willing and able to sit on inventory for months or years. Individuals usually can’t or won’t do that. But he was charging more than Marty would.

If not, there’ll be more next week, or if not, the week after. ‘Tis the season, and very early in the season, at that.

The problem with online streaming video

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , ,

I think we may have lost a project at work today: a project to do streaming video. It’s not really our fault; our offering looked just like everyone else’s streaming video.

The problem is that our competition isn’t everyone else’s streaming video.First let’s look at the hurdles. No matter which option you pick, some percentage of your audience is going to have to download or install something. That all but eliminates Real, since I don’t think even Woodward and Bernstein could successfully track down the link to their free player every time.

Windows Media Player is easier, but won’t necessarily run on some older versions of Windows. An overwhelming number of people have Windows XP now, but not everyone does. How many hundreds of millions of copies of Windows 98 did Microsoft sell? Do you think all of those people have thrown them away yet? No. Those people will have to download and install something.

But Media Player will leave some Macintoshes in the cold. Do you want to do that if your target audience might include schools?

QuickTime is the best cross-platform solution, but again, Windows users will have to download and install something.

OK, so you got it installed. Prepare thyself for thrilling, 15 frame-per-second 160×120 video!

Translation: Video the size of a postage stamp that moves about as fast as your mailman.

Theoretically you can stream bigger and faster video, but it’s going to be jerkier if you do. There’ll be dropped frames, artifacts, and the audio may drop out. And what’s it look like when you send DVD-sized 720×480 video? Well, considering a lot of people run their monitors at 1024×768, it makes letterboxing look good. It’s not full-screen like it is when you pop a DVD into your DVD drive.

And that’s precisely the problem. The competition isn’t other people who stream video. The competition is DVDs. Computers are digital, right? So why does its video look worse than the oldest, most worn-out VHS tape at the video rental place? And why do I have to jump through so many hoops in order to play it? On a DVD, I hit the "menu" button and then I hit "enter" or "play." (Also keep in mind that some people can’t even figure out how to do that. I’m serious. I dated a girl once whose parents couldn’t figure out a DVD player, so they had to get their 15-year-old son to come hit the buttons for them.)

And that, I think, is the reason you still don’t see tons and tons of streaming video on the Web, in spite of the high availability of DSL and cable modems in the United States, the abundance of cheap bandwidth, and the cheapness of the server software (free, in the case of QuickTime, and included with Windows Server in the case of Media Player).

Scribus isn\’t a bad open-source DTP program

Dave Farquhar Linux , , ,

A Slashdot mention of a MadPenguin review of Scribus brought up a very insightful lament: No reviews of Scribus appear online from someone very familiar with the competition, namely Adobe PageMaker and InDesign, and QuarkXPress.

As a University of Missouri journalism graduate, I’m going to tell you what I think of Scribus and simultaneously try to amuse you.Let me first get something out of the way: Microsoft Publisher is a toy. And I mean “toy” in the most condescending manner possible. I’m not talking a charming vintage toy that brings good feelings of quality and nostalgia. No sir, I’m bringing to mind cheap, mass-produced junk from a factory that makes its workers pay to work there, sold in vending machines in seedy-looking stores in seedy neighborhoods.

And I’m not talking the nice vending machines that take two quarters either.

I’ve been forced to do production work in Microsoft Publisher. I wish they’d just gone all the way and handed me a copy of Print Shop and told me to use that. At least Print Shop doesn’t have any delusions of grandeur.

I didn’t go to the best journalism school in the country and endure classes taught by professors with nicknames like “The Nazi”–I took a class from the instructor who inspired Brad Pitt to drop out of journalism school and run away to Hollywood when he was a mere three hours from a journalism degree, and I endured her class and I passed it, but I do have to say I don’t blame him–I’m sure I lost your train of thought there, but I didn’t endure all of that to have my hand held by a misguided wizard that looks like a #^%@$ paperclip.

There. I feel a lot better now.

Wait. Let me say one more thing. Microsoft Publisher isn’t the competition for this program, nor should it be.

The proper introduction to desktop publishing is Adobe PageMaker. It’s the easiest to learn of the “serious” DTP tools, and while it’s not well suited to particularly complex designs, and quite possibly the buggiest piece of software not manufactured by Microsoft that I’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with, it does the best job of teaching people how to throw a bunch of text into columns onto a piece of paper without overwhelming them with too many tools.

But QuarkXPress is king. At Mizzou, once we’d learned QuarkXPress, we j-students were known to ditch word processors entirely and just use XPress for everything because of its enormous text-handling capabilities. And in spite of its features, it’s a much leaner, meaner program than any word processor on the market, taking up less memory, loading faster, and generally doing everything else faster. I even used it to write term papers for my history classes. I hate Quark the company, but I’ll tell you how I feel about its product.

Rolls-Royce tries to be the QuarkXPress of cars.

(I couldn’t tell you if Rolls-Royce ever succeeded or not, having never ridden in one of its cars.)

OK, so what about Scribus?

Well, you already know my bias. From an ease of use standpoint, I found it somewhere between PageMaker and QuarkXPress. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Ease of use has never been the goal of this type of software. Frankly I don’t know how you make a program of this type any easier to use without dumbing it down to Publisher’s level, and by the time you do that, you might as well just go all the way and create a Print Shop clone. That way you’ve actually created something useful.

Concentrating too much on making DTP software easy to use is like trying to make a chainsaw that’s incapable of injuring the operator. The end result isn’t going to be very useful.

But I’ve digressed again.

Feature-wise, I’ve found it to be at least the equal of PageMaker. Whether it lacks some of the features of QuarkXPress or I wasn’t able to quickly find them, I’m not sure. So while I wasn’t able to quickly figure out how to make it bend and distort text, it took me about 30 seconds to figure out how to do the really important things like scaling text and changing tracking and leading.

I wasn’t able to work as quickly in Scribus as I could in QXP, but that’s not a fair comparison. For a semester I spent more time in QXP than I spent in Word, if that tells you anything.

I also spent more time in QXP than I spent in Civilization and Railroad Tycoon combined. (Not by choice though. Yes I’m crazy, but not that crazy.)

I guess I should come to a conclusion here.

I’m really glad to see Scribus. I think it’s pretty good stuff. I think it’s really incredibly good stuff for the price. You see, QuarkXPress is priced like a Rolls-Royce. Scribus is free.

Better than Publisher? Of course. Then again, so is a trip to the dentist.

Better than PageMaker? I’m inclined to say yes. Better enough that if both programs cost the same amount of money, I’d buy Scribus.

Will I use Scribus again? You bet.

I can’t wait to see what they come up with for version 2.0.

Congratulations to Wikipedia for two Webby nominations

Dave Farquhar General ,

Wikipedia has been nominated for two Webby awards this year.

It’s up against some heavy hitters (currently losing to Google and LiveJournal in its two categories), but just a nomination is an acomplishment, let alone a second-place finish, which looks like a probability.

Wikipedia, in case you don’t know, is an effort to create a free and complete encyclopedia. Anyone can contribute to it, which is the best and worst thing about it. As time goes on, that becomes more of a good thing than a bad thing. There are topics in Wikipedia that get ample coverage that an encyclopedia written by academics would never touch, either because the subject is too taboo, or because it’s too obscure.

Wikipedia is growing at an explosive rate. Its article count hit 200,000 earlier this year and has already hit 250,000. (I’m surprised this didn’t get mention on Slashdot, but earlier milestones have.) I recommend you check it out. As time goes on, you’ll stumble across it more and more when you search the Web for information.

At least one person who read about Wikipedia initially on this site has gone on to become an editor over there. To which I say, congratulations.

I don’t contribute to Wikipedia at nearly the rate I once did. To be a major contributor, at least at one point, was to invite conflict–and conflict was something I neither had time nor energy for. I had better things to do than battle with someone with a too-big ego. The person I had the most conflicts with has since left the project, and I resigned myself to more obscure topics: First, 1980s computing, and later, model railroading. These days, I guess I appear to be strictly an O gauge specialist. But that’s OK. There’s a lot of information out there that people want and can’t find.

So that’s what I encourage you to do. You don’t have to become an every-day contributor, or even a regular one. Check out what Wikipedia has to say about your hometown and add one detail that might be missing. Do the same for an organization you belong to or admire, or maybe a company that you happen to know a lot about. If your favorite hobby isn’t anywhere to be found, write up an introduction. Frequently when a new article appears, someone else notices it and contributes something. And soon, what once was nothing becomes a pretty good encyclopedia entry.

Wikipedia is definitely something I recommend to anyone who wants to write professionally. Write a couple of entries and watch the changes people make to them. Some will be good, and some will be terrible. Learning to tell the difference is the skill that separates a competent writer from a good or even great one.

One way for neighbors to harass each other

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Dan Rutter always makes me laugh. And his current front page is no exception: While he normally talks computers or R/C toys, he’s made no secret of his love for cats. And last week he made an impassioned plea for Australians to adopt cats. And he noted that his shelter of choice also has “dogs and camels and stuff.”

Which of course gave me an idea.Of course I haven’t tried this because, well, I don’t live in Australia, and when I clicked on the link promising camels all I got were fluffy bunny rabbits. No big nasty teeth, no bones strewn about, and no knights who say “ni!” in sight.

So here’s what I’m thinking, assuming someplace that promised camels actually delivered or something. I had a bad lease about five years ago that I was looking for a way out of. The place wasn’t so much the problem, it was that my neighbors were psycho.

Well, guess what? The lease didn’t say anything about not allowing pets. Camel, anyone?

I think that would have been the end of my lease. Fortunately, we’re talking about people who aren’t very smart here.

Landlords, here’s what to do if one of your tenants gets a camel. First, find out if it’s female. Hopefully it is. Then, rent a male camel from somewhere. (You’re on your own as to where you can get a camel for a day in the United States.) You know what’s next. Lots of little camels running around, that’s what.

Then when the neighbor comes calling, you act all innocent. Camel? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh, that camel! Nope, couldn’t be him, he was neutered. Your camel must have gotten friendly with a stray or something…

Or maybe I’m just slap-happy.

Lucky for me, my neighbors are cool. I’m the weirdest guy in the neighborhood.

Trust me, after living next door to people who believed the X-Files were real, it’s good to be the weirdest guy in the neighborhood.

Conversation in a hardware store checkout line

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , ,

Cashier: (Observing the one-inch fender washers in my hand) You playing washers?Me: Actually, I’m going to try to make wheels for an old train.

Cashier: Did you try Hobby Country?

Me: Oh yeah, but they don’t have anything for something like this (pre-War American Flyer). These wheels haven’t been made for almost 70 years.

Cashier: My brother’s into old trains. He and his son go to England to get old trains.

Me: (Eyes getting big.) Oh yeah, Hornby made some really cool stuff!

Cashier: I’m like, why do you have to go all the way over there to buy trains?

Me: Because Hornby made a whole bunch of cool stuff that never made it over here!

I guess I’ve got it kind of bad, huh? I’m not booking flights for England but I know why someone else is, and what they’re probably looking for…

Umax scanner drivers

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

In the past I have recommended Umax scanners because Umax has a better history than HP of providing drivers for newer operating systems.I’ve heard from various sources (including the forums on driver sites) that Umax US isn’t providing drivers for free anymore. I guess the trick is knowing where to look. If Umax US isn’t providing the driver you need, Umax UK’s driver page probably does have it. (Remember, Windows 2000 drivers often work in Windows XP.)

I guess I’ve never noticed this because I’ve always tended to download the drivers from the UK.

Outsource your home e-mail to keep viruses at bay

Dave Farquhar Viruses ,

I’m going to be spending most of Saturday patching servers at work, and Microsoft just kindly dropped four new patches I didn’t want in my Easter basket (so run Windows Update on your home PC if you haven’t recently), and that reminds me of something.

End users are notoriously bad about running Windows Update and updating their virus definitions, both of which really need to be done on a regular basis in these terrible times. Microsoft doesn’t seem to realize not everyone has broadband and this takes some time, but that’s the price of running Windows, I guess.

I have a suggestion for people who aren’t very technical.Those of you who are technical and provide help for friends and relatives, get your friends and relatives to quit using Outlook Express to read their ISP’s mail and move them to a webmail-based solution, such as Yahoo Mail. Yahoo’s spam filtering is pretty effective, and Yahoo keeps its virus definitions up to date. Since most viruses transmit through e-mail these days, this may provide adequate protection for most people. Yahoo limits the size of attachments you can send, so configure Outlook Express for sending large attachments using the ISP’s SMTP server, but change the return address to point at the Yahoo address. If the person is reluctant about changing e-mail addresses, call the ISP’s technical support line and see if the ISP will forward the account’s mail to the Yahoo account.

Those of you who aren’t technical, get someone to help you do this if it sounded like Swahili to you.

Hotmail works too, but when you register for Yahoo mail, you get access to Yahoo’s discussion groups too, and Yahoo has a discussion group/forum for just about everything imaginable. Way back in the dark ages before the Internet was in every household, the discussion groups were one of the major draws of online services like CompuServe, GEnie, and Delphi.

Google’s GMail will be better than Yahoo’s mail, allowing people to search on their inboxes, but it’s not ready for you and me yet. I still don’t understand the big to-do about Google targeting text sidebar advertising on your e-mail–they already do it when you search using their site. But that’s another discussion.

Useful online Genealogy databases

Dave Farquhar Genealogy

I found some useful links today. It’s from a genealogy blog that copied verbatim one of my entries from a few months ago (but with attribution, at least), so turnabout is fair play.

For links to online passenger lists, see this entry in the Genealogy Blog. Looking through it, I see names of ships I know I’ve seen before but I can’t remember when.The genealogy software I use now lists anniversaries, so to keep my tree somewhat managable, when I don’t have a branch that I’m actively chasing down (or other stuff going on that keeps me from this stuff), I check the anniversaries. Since I have nearly 2,400 names in my tree, rarely a day goes by that isn’t the anniversary of something.

For instance, today was the anniversary of my great-great grandmother’s death. There’s a lot of controversy about her. I believe her name probably was Julianne Breeden or Julianne Breeding. My grandmother’s living brothers and sisters insist her last name was Breeden. It may very well have been, and it could be a transcription error in census records.

At any rate, researching people on anniversaries makes it much less daunting. At times I’ve found myself rushing to enter as many names as possible, which meant I didn’t record much in the way of dates or other details that I need now. If I tell myself I’m only going to check a handful of people, I’m much more likely to enter everything I can find. And if I record all the dates, then that means I will probably see that record three times a year–on the anniversaries of birth, death, and marriage.

So my records end up being a lot more complete and accurate. Sometimes I find typos and I fix them. Sometimes I just document sources. (Sources are important, but a lot of people, sadly, neglect them.)

And you know what? My tree still grows. By following a person’s branch forward and backward a couple of generations on his or her anniversary, I almost always find a couple more names I didn’t have before. I think I entered 10 names yesterday and today.

That sounds wimpy compared to those first few days when I probably entered several hundred names per day. But this is a much more sustainable rate of growth.