The park train operation in Fairview Michigan has gone under and the owners have up the rolling stock and infrastructure for sale.

https://discoverlivesteam.com/discoverf ... syimbxiPGY

Actually, that's not a bad price but some of the descriptive text is pretty amusing.

That’s the former Schraders Railroad Catalog operation isn’t it? They’ve been trying to sell for years now. At one time they offered the property, house, business, client list, inventory and railroad as a package deal. No idea of the price, but I’m sure it was a lot.
I’m not sure how well the train did or how often they operated it, but the photos looked like an impressive railroad.

Twenty years ago this would have sold last week, but given the current interests of kids, the aging out of the railroad enthusiast community, plus the state of the economy and pandemic restrictions, this is going to be a tough sell, at least as a package. It's a beautiful railroad and trains, but maybe the wrong era.

I'm reading the ad to say it's selling the rolling stock and track materials, you remove. As I noted in my reply, they've been attempting to sell it all since at least early 2017. A post on Trainorders indicates the price was $1.5 million, which if it included the business, the land, the railroad and inventory, seems like a pretty fair price to me. Far out reach, but fair.

It looks like they've given up on that approach and are selling off the railroad, presumably to create a property that's more attractive to the general public as a potential homeowner.

I believe they sold the catalogue business a couple of years ago, maybe the whole thing, and the buyer is trying to sell-off the parts they don't want to keep. I always found their catalogue to be pretty pedestrian in terms of railroad merchandise, the kind of stuff a non-railroad oriented person would get as a gift for the fan in their lives, but not stuff those of us who are steeped in the business and the hobby would buy for ourselves. If I know someone who considers themselves to be a very hard-core member of a hobby or genre that I'm not familiar with, I would generally avoid buying them something having to do with their interest, because I know whatever I would see available to the general public wouldn't really be of much interest to someone deep into that avocation. It would be like buying a serious programmer Windows for Dummies. In other words, I really wouldn't want a copy of The Big Book of Trains, when I'm really hoping to get something like a history of railroad signalling and rules. That granular.

That's because they sold mass market items to the vast majority of readers of Trains Magazine, not the far smaller audience that makes up RYPN.

You also overlooked the even larger audience for such products, Model Railroaders. I don't have the numbers at hand, but I know that Model Railroader outsells Trains by a good margin.

The casual hobbyist and the model railroaders both vastly outnumber those who know what a hydrostatic lubricator is, let alone how to fill one. That was/is their target.

BTW, if you're running a museum or tourist railroad, that's your market too.