About the boxes, there is at least one dealer on ebay.de who does not always auction railway models with the matching boxes. I suspect that is because their stock of secondhand items being auctioned arrives in disarray (loose, unpacked, disorganised collections of hundreds of items of now deceased persons ?) The time needed to go through catalogues to identify items and match them with their correct boxes is not cost effective, in most cases.

Instead the dealer auctions models singly, (or in small lots of 2 or 3 as "Konvolut"), and simultaneously auctions empty boxes in sets of 10 to 15 boxes.

In rare cases, an ebay lot consisting of say 10 empty boxes will sell for 35 or 40 Euro (or more ?), I have seen this happen. That is probably because there is one box among the ten which matches an unusual model. The unusual model is worth much more with a correct box to other collectors than it is worth without the correct box. Just having the box might make the 35 Euro difference, for example.

However, run of the mill boxes generally reach about 1 or 2 Euro.

I think that in the long term the model railway items that will maintain their value are such things as the Pre-WW2 Märklin. If the number of collectors increases over time, their value will increase over time.

The modern day collectors´ editions and limited editions are a racket for the gullible mass-market. The manufacturers will make as many of these limited editions as they can sell, and then some, which means supply exceeds demand, and eventually the market will have the bottom fall out of it. (Similarly for stamp collecting and coin collecting, in Australia the Australian mint and Australia Post are accused of killing off the hobby by flooding the market with collector issues.)

I do not know to what extent the production of relatively expensive "Fine Arts" models by Minitrix led to its own demise, but if that is the case, it is part of a syndrome affecting other manufacturers.
 

Edited 1 time by May 8 13 6:57 AM.