Did I get a bargain?

[Mr Bones]

Rare model locomotives sold for 'astonishing' £25,000

[Mountain Goat]

I don't think so. Seems a lot to me. Best not tell the wife.

[RAF96]

If you visit Gildings web site for that auction there were a huge amount of lots and some went for bargain prices.

[Mountain Goat]

Only takes two people who sign in to bid who happen to have bought these certain makes of keyboard with a sticky button (Sponsored by the auction site) and ...

Seriously though. Didn't really buy it for £25k did you Mr Bones as it is rather a lot to pay for a loco?

[Mr Bones]

I can assure you there is no way on earth I would pay that sort of money or anywhere near it. In fact I've never paid full price and hopefully never will.
I was just amazed at how much they actually went for. Must be some serious collectors out there...

[Mountain Goat]

Am wondering if the people collecting these are the same ones who keep buying new 00 and are responsible for the price increases as the manufacturers can guarantee sales at any price so they increase and increase their prices until they reach the point where the saled drop off, and then draw it back a bit, but my guessing is that they have not reached that ultimate price yet?

Most large companies use these pricing programs these days which are linked into the systems that record card and online sales (But also cash sales if the retail shops have modern electronic tills that directly record each item and are linked via the internet to their banking system) and it can very well be within the hobby that if the manufacturers use such systems (If they are linked into the stock market it is rare that they don't use them) than one will see the prices going up and up until they reach the point that the manufacturers sales volumes fall below the volume of production and they then slightly ease off from there.
The issue is with our hobby is where items are in high demand, as manufacturing may be limited to the point where it can't increase without significent investment which renders the process uneconomical to do, these programs will increase the pricing structure instead to compensate, and is one of the things I hate about modern marketing methods.

Auctions dealing with used items will naturally reach whatever anyone is prepared to pay for it, but new sales are linked into these pricing programs where minimum prices are set and the amount of items in a production can also be set and the prices are adjusted each time the adjustment is called for. (Some supermarkets and online retailers automatically adjust prices daily but with the likes of our hobby I would imagine it is done yearly due to written price lists or quarterly if not, but the key is that the more adjustments the program does the quicker it finds this optimum price so with model railways, it will likely keep rising prices way above inflation as model railways prices are only adjusted periodically and not daily or weekly like some supermarkets programs do?)

While I write about new items and how prices are set these days, auctions are a diffeeent matter but they do work in a similar way if one examines them, but manually run and inputted (Or semi manually or completely manually as the case maybe but the pattern of pricing is similar, though these pricing machines for mass markets deal with volumes of the same item rather than just one as auctions do).

It is fascinating to look at the patterns of these machines. If one picks up on patterns of numbers, even if one did not know about these programs, one would pick up on their tell-tale patterns of adjustment via the sudden above inflation leaps that these programming machines do as their patterns are different from the human touch and feel who will adjust based on sentiment and mental and humanistic "Feel" rather than a programming machine looking for that optimum figure as both approaches differ (Though of course a programming machine has a manual over-ride so if it decides to suddenly double prices at the next price adjustment because the machine thinks it can, but the humans who know their market think better of it, no doubt adjustments can be made and this is where those who see patterns of figures can find the human input confusing as it does not follow the machines patterns and yet it does!)

I never forget an autistic girlfriend I once had (Though was distance dating so only met her a few times) said that if she wanted to, and took a short time studying the details, she could easily pick out winners at horse and dog racing events and when she did it out of boredom (Though she never actually bet on them) she was rarely ever wrong as it was the racing patterns of each individual horse and how the betting system adjusted the odds that she was picking up on and not the actual insider knowledge that the enthusiastic seasoned betters relied upon which gave her more predictable results.