Hello, Everyone:

Tell us what loco you dream to buy.

This is my locomotive dream; comes with a sound decoder and a 324 Euro price tag plus shipment and HST

It's the ROCO Italian FS Electric locomotive series E 645: BELLA!

I really like them all, Waorb, but my favourite is the first one, in THREE parts!

My dream loco at the moment would be a Br06. The Brawa one is beautiful, but a bit expensive for my pocket right now. I would love to see a Marklin one, to follow from the old SK800, but this time with the right number of wheels!

Hi,

My dream locomotives would be vintage Märklin 3052 (Austrian 1020.31) and 3019.1 (green Da), but they'd have to be mint condition, unused, and boxed, including instruction manuals and preferably the quality control tags. I managed to get hold of a mint 3019.2 earlier this year, but the first version has eluded me so far. This summer I almost bought a 3052, but the seller could not or did not want to give an affirmative answer when I asked if the locomotive was really original and authentic. The strange thing was that he offered to send the 3052 to my address without any pre-payment to let me decide if I wanted to keep (and pay for) it. It's a well-known professional Ebay seller from Bavaria who knows me, but I didn't accept his offer because fake 3052s are often very hard to detect. You'd need to have another 3052 to compare it to. Given the amount of money involved, it was safer for me to assume that the one I considered buying was probably fake because the seller couldn't guarantee that it was authentic. Other professional sellers that I know will tell customers by email if they are sure that a given locomotive is original.

Best regards,
Mark

... mines can always be found in it.... do not pay attention to the year....

"The "fake" would still be a Marklin loco with perhaps some details altered or some repainting done with the intention of trying to pass it off as another more expensive variant."

You mean, Ray, that Marklin would do this? Why????

Hi Walter,

The 3052 sells at about 2,500 euros nowadays if it's really new and original, including the box as well as the instruction manual, but it's quite similar to the German E94 (Märklin 3022.1 or 3022.2 made in the 1960s), which has a value of about 150-200 euros in mint condition and is often faked to make it look like a 3052. All the printed inscriptions have to be changed, of course, but that can be done by forgers. Faking a 3052 is made easier by the fact that the livery of the 3052 was the same shade of green as that of the 3022. In addition, the boxes and the instriction manuals were almost identical in the mid-1960s. You just need one blue sticker on the cover of the box and two white ones on the sides to make a fake 3052 box, and the product number 3052 was originally stamped on the instruction manual of the 3022, not printed. Forgers use an old rubber stamp and add the magic product number to make buyers believe it's real.

In fact, fake instruction manuals of the 3052 appear on Ebay on a regular basis. Often, buyers are fooled and pay over one hundred euros though the stamped number 3052 is obviously not original. Even the thin blue sticker across the picture on the cover of the box can be faked, as I have read in a collector's forum. A fake 3052 costs as much as a real one if the buyer doesn't notice. It's very hard to tell if a 3052 is authentic from pictures you see on the Internet, but with an ultraviolet lamp you can see if the livery is all original or if anything has been repainted.

There are also fakes of the 3063 based on the 3066, but they are easier to recognise if you know what to look for.

Best regards,
Mark

P.S./Edit: Here's a link to a thread from a German forum with photos of a real and a fake 3052. In the photos in which they are next to each other, the fake 3052 is on the right. The one on the left is my dream locomotive.

Forum Alte Modellbahnen: Authentic vs. fake 3052

As a collector of 1960's Märklin my dreams happen to also be of that era. At the moment I'm most interested in this beauty:



Also, I would very much like to someday own this one:



I know it isn't a very realistic model of the prototype but I've somehow grown fond of it after flaring through all of the old catalogues..

And do I even have to mention this one

I did it!

I just bought my dream loco, the ROCO 72322 FS E645 102.

I will have to go to Italy to pick it up, mind you, but it's worth it.

in the 1980's I had the opportunity to buy 3900 kits which I did, 2 x 3923, 2 x 3914, 1 x 3911, 1 x 3946, 2 x3947 and 2 x 3948, at the time of the purchases I didn't know all the numbers and the numbers provided didn't come with a loco number. other locos such as the crocodile and the DSB, TM 800, SK 800 (3907) had also been offered.

John