It is always sad when a nice store goes out of business, it feels a bit like an old friend passed away.

That is why whenever possible, I prefer to buy my locos, etc., at a store rather than on E-bay. Problem is, there are not too many of these stores left.

My "worst experience" with Märklin was when I was around 16 years old;
An opportunity arose to go to Flensburg, Germany (I lived near Elsinore, Denmark at that time), to buy some model trains. At that time I could get roughly 1/2 - 1/3 more stuff for my hard-earned money, so I set out on an epic journey with a friend, to spend all my earnings in a shop there. (The shop was called "Fröbelhaus" or something like that, in the pedstrian zone of Flensburg).
In this -my biggest 1-time investment in Märklin- in my life so far, included a fanzy Silberlinge cabcar with changing lights depending of direction of travel.
Big was my illusion, and huge my deception when -at home- I found out that the car basically shorted the track out, and no lights or operation was possible with it. Now, this particular coach was seriously expensive, and I already hadnt told my parents about that I had spent ALL my money on trains, so I had to figure out a way to limit my losses. This was in the early 80´ies, and my experience with shopping from a distance, sending parcels by mail, or even try to make a reclamation in german wasnt really something that I was up to. Also I wasnt able to solve this (probably trivial) technical problem by myself either.
So I ended up travelling to Copenhagen and buying a similar coach from one of the many shops of the huge "BR" toyshop chain. (They incidently no longer carry Märklin...). Then I went to the cinema to spend a few hours, and after the movie I swapped the new coach with the defective one from Germany, and made a reclamation for money-back in the toyshop.
Of course this is all highly unethic and immoral, but thinking back on the incident I cant help laughing (at myself) of how pathetic I went about it all; failing to ID myself correctly in the shop, giving up a false address, etc... The stress, embarrasment and bad concience was so huge that I have never tried to do anything similar again!

PS: The "new" Silberlinge cabcar has worked flawlessly ever since! :-)

The most difficult problem I've had to fix on one of my locos was on my 37972 Br 34.74 (Bavarian B VI).

When I had just received it I needed to change the address by opening up the tender to alter the position of the DIP switches on the decoder. The top of the tender was very tight and I had to use quite a bit of force to remove it. When it finally came apart I managed to snap the plastic bar that connects the tender to the loco!

I had to order the part specially, which I managed to do through Lokshop, and then very painstakingly desolder the wires that ran through the hollow bar before being able to take the broken part out. Afterwards I had to solder the wires back after feeding them through the new bar.

This loco is quite small and has a lot of delicate details, and I was terrified all the way through the repair that I would break another bit off! Luckily I managed to get it back good as new!