I have about 120 N scale Micro-Trains and Kadee/Micro-Trains cars. A few of them are special run or very rare. I know that there is a guide where you can see what the value is on Ebay and other sides. Do you know the name of this guide and where i can buy it?
Try the N Scale Collector website. The N Scale Collector There is an Armstrong Guide and a Miller Guide that give values that cars have or have had at some time in the past. They are just that..."guides" since the value of your cars or any cars are only what a willing buyer is prepared to pay at any given time. Your cars may bring more or less. These guides will give you some idea as to their relative value.
Rett beat me to it... But I will add the caveat that unless something has changed, NONE of the commercial "price guides" include eBay transactions. Most (if not all) of the price guide authors do not recognize eBay as a legitimate venue for sales of collectible Micro-Trains, citing numerous reasons including the inability to validate the actual condition of the item being sold. [Strangely, I don't ever hear cited the one really valid reason I see for not including eBay, namely, the impracticality of being able to keep up with the thousands of auctions of MTL cars that occur each year, coupled with eBay's active resistance to the ability to extract and record that many results.] It is my contention that with the exception of the rare cars that really do have only collector appeal (and the prices to go with that), eBay is a more accurate gauge of the current state of the aftermarket than the price guides are. Its presence certainly has impacted the collector side of the market, given that even the N Scale Collector (disclaimer: which I write for) has noted a net decrease in MTL sale prices two years running.
We added some price-guide style tracking to TroveStar. If, for example, you are collecting Micro-Trains 39' Tank Cars, you can see this list: http://www.trovestar.com/generic/index.php?Collection=4&Body+Style=MTR-065&Brand=Micro-Trains And there will appear a column called 'Market'. This column might be blank or have up to two numbers in it. If a number is in parentheses, that means there is an open auction or a fixed price item up for sale at the last time TroveStar look at eBay. A second number without parentheses is a average price of completed auctions and sold fixed price listings. So at a glance, you can see where the market has been and where it is right now for any given car. Keep in mind that there are lots of variations, particularly on older cars. The "Blue Label" versions tend to price higher than other versions of the same car. There can be color and printing variations as well as differences in trucks and doors. A lot of this information can be found in our collector's guide here: http://www.trovestar.com/special/ntrains/mtl_guide.php. For the parenthetical () prices, they can be stale, as the eBay market is constantly changing and TroveStar cannot be refreshing prices on 30,000 items in real time. The best way to check is to click on the item and then click on the ebay links above the item image. That will give you an up-to-date market snapshot. Prices are refreshed whenever a user or a bot visits the item. We hope you find this useful.
One of the problems with price guides (other than trying to track the shear volume of MT cars that have been produced) is that it will usually show the highest price paid for a particular car...not the average price or even a 'current' price. Lots of MT cars went for much more before 2008 (the heigth of the market) than they go for today since people were freer with spending their money then than they are now. Also, re-releases of cars (with different numbers) can effect the prices. There was a time when I kept track of most of my cars, but it is just hard to tell what a 'current' price is these days.
I was planning on taking a page from my background in tracking stock market data. You can do a weighted average with outlier trimming. This is actually pretty easy to write and your post makes me think I should code it sooner rather than later. Once I have 10 or more data points, I can eliminate outlier prices by removing data points more than two standard deviations from the mean. I can then take the remaining prices and weight them by "recentness" with a decay function where a price from today weights in at one and prices older than one year converge on a zero weighting (but never quite reach there). I believe this would address both of the issues you are pointing out.
The prices for the older "collector" MTL cars seems to be way down now. This past week I watched a Kadee ATW Family Lines rib side boxcar, in original box with label but no price tag, sell for 10.49 from a reputable seller. A few years ago this car would not have gone below 50.00, even without the price sticker.
Unless I know a particular car is rare, all MTL cars I sell start at $9.98. I then let the market decide what it will sell for. In fact I have a lot of thinning to do in the next month or so using this method. "Price Guides" are meaningless and are more likely to lead one astray and greedily expect too much for what they are selling. These end up being the same high priced cars that get relisted over and over again every week for months at a time.
I believe the NSE guide is the same as the Armstrong Guide mentioned by UPGUY in his first reply. Jack Armstrong is on the board of the NSE I believe, though the Armstrong guide is not an 'official' NSE product. Or did you have something else in mind?
N Scale Collector, as mentioned, is now NSE. I stopped following such affairs back in the latter 1990's. I was one of the first two dozen members of the KDVCC group, (the Kadee Variations Collectors Club), which organized this portion of our hobby. It was the auctioning of my collection, thirty years ago by Wick Brandon, (original owner of TnR), which threw the craze wide open. Up until then, such sales had been only small batches. Although some highs have reached since then, the actual frenzy peaked during the 1990's. Somewhere, I still have a couple of the old Miller Guides. Or possibly one of Sootsman's.
I've noticed a significant decline in pricing at shows, with some cars selling for less that they did when new. Quite a change from the days when collectors bought three of each Kadee/M-T car every month -- one to sell, one to keep and one to run. I buy very few cars, except as a souvenirs if I travel and can find a local shop. I'm quite happy running my old stuff.
Prices on available items at ebay, just as with prices on items on tables at shows, only tell us what items are *not* selling for. If they are available at that price, it means the buyer hasn't found a seller. I look to the nscaleyardsale group at yahoo as the best measure of what MT items are worth. It is very common these days for sellers to list huge collections for around $10 per car (maybe a few bucks more for the items that initially sold for more due to complexity in design, paint scheme, etc). IMHO, the days of true collecting in this area of our hobby are dead (RIP). No great loss. That said, if it weren't for the zealots who would buy three of everything, the runners would have never had access to as many offerings (we also wouldn't have had to cringe at Smokey Bear, Pepsi and the nauseating list of "collector cars.") Fortunately, our MT's still have inherent value so, unlike beanie babies, will probably never bottom out at "worthless."
