Sometime during the first week, we got braver and wanted more options, realizing what pieces were missing and why they'd be nice. We had no risers or anything, so I looked on Craigslist, and some lady was selling pieces ala carte at quite reasonable prices. I went with a budget of $40 and left having spent $60. That said, the resale prices on just one of the bridges alone made it worthwhile. We got three stacking risers, which normally could be found for between $20 and $30 total on ebay, for $5 apiece, some other generic risers for perhaps a dollar apiece, a couple of bridges, the Thomas Mountain tunnel - I'm wigging out on the name right now, I'll come back and fix it with the right name later. But the risers were precious. And even better were the adapta-track converters which have ends on that flip to convert to male-male or female-female, for those times when you get stuck and can't use a normal male to female piece. Trying to use the normal block underneath the ascending track pieces is a pain, and with a crawling baby in the way, it was sort of futile.
Here's one of our first layouts made up on our own.
The beauty of buying from other people is that you accidentally benefit from someone else's knowledge. Whether you appreciate how expensive these things are, or what pieces you might need at that moment is sort of irrelevant. You'll buy it and later think you're genius.
If you have the budget, I'd even suggest just possibly getting a sub >$100 large lot from ebay. But I didn't think we'd spend that much. I didn't know how much we'd like it and how much it all costs and how much things keep resale value.
Whatever you spend, you're going to get a nice chunk of it back when you sell, especially if it IS the official Learning Curve Thomas brand stuff. So if you buy genuine Thomas stuff used, when you resell it, you may very well get 100% of your money back. Think of it as a toy rental!
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