Hi everyone, this may be old news but I couldn't find anything on here about it.

I was recently able to pickup the auction catalogs from the Noel Barrett Ward Kimball train auctions. For anyone that hasn't seen these, I thought I would post something about them here on Burnsland. I'm positive some of you guys already have them but I would expect that some people did not know that they existed. There was a catalog for each of the two auctions. The first catalog is 102 pages and the second is 98 pages. These are in full color and are 11" x 8 1/2". If you have ever seen the large LGB catalogs, these are similar but without all of the items shown in a train layout.

Although I knew that Ward had one of the largest collections of his time, it's very interesting to thumb through everything and read the details about each item. These are probably not definitive guides as a whole for a train & toy collector but I would expect that there are probably many items in these catalogs that are not show in print anywhere else. These are great for general reference and who better to put it together than Ward himself. Being the Noel Barrett was a friend of Ward's I think these received special attention to detail.

Out of curiosity I emailed Noel Barrett and they still has some of these available. They did and can be ordered through their site at $45 each. Not sure how many they had in stock but I would guess that these will not be reprinted. If you are a collector or just a big Ward fan I'd highly recommend picking them up. Although just a little pricy, I think they are really worth having. Here is a link to their site.

http://noelbarrett.com/html/pastcatalogs.html

And for those of you who did not already know this, you can also find his collection online with the ability to zoom in on the pictures which is nice but I like the printed catalog much better. It's much easier to find something in the printed catalog if you have an actual item in front of you and you are trying to locate it in the catalog.

http://www.liveauctioneers.com/catalog/1398/page1

http://www.liveauctioneers.com/catalog/2264/page2