Benson bits and pieces - bargains for the parts bin.

One of my favourite areas of any model railroad show is the secondhand sales tables, I'm always keen to pick up a bargain or a bag of bits for the parts bin and this weekends Benson NMRA meet was no exception.

The bring-and-buy tables were packed with all kinds of kits and bits, including a huge collection of 'O' gauge and a massive selection of Walther Amtrak coaches, along with the usual Athearn blue box and other assorted HO stock.

I picked up a number of cheap items that caught my eye, although all of them are very definitely going to be filed in the parts bin or added to the 'to do' list.

This Railpower SD60M (bizzarely painted in Warbonnet scheme) was a great deal at only £6, worth it for the trucks, plow and cables alone, I will probably strip the shell and rebuild it as a different roadname at some point.

This Dummy GP60 was only £3 and will make a good parts loco, or I may add a motor and sell it on.

A dash 9 shell minus one of it's fuel tank sides for 50p

Four DPM/Rix buildings for £9, these will clean up nicely to fill out my next freemo module.

A vintage Heljan/Con-Cor kit for a Ford C Auto Transporter.  All the parts seem to be there, including the transfers and instructions.  This was £3 but I'm already thinking that it might be too rare to build and perhaps would be best sold on to a collector instead.

There were several more items that caught my eye, including a number of Athearn blue box Railbox cars at £2 each, but I opted to save those for another day (i've got several on the to-do list already) and having reviewed the sheer number of projects waiting in boxes here in the house, I reckon I might need to do a bit of a spring clean and sell on some of the less likely projects before my next purchasing trip.