Do you remember the first item you ever sold online? Let us know by sending an email to ina@auctionbytes.com and we may publish your story. Today we hear from Dennis whose keen eye at a real life auction led to a jackpot online.

Hi Ina,
Ok here's our story....and in our family it is simply referred to as the rr plate.

Way back in 98 and 99, I was trying to make a little extra money being retired on disability. We were doing a little flea marketing and we would get items at our local auction house and take them there...we made a little but nothing to brag about.

Now I have a very broad based knowledge...sort of like trivia info....and ebay was the place to make that pay since I would be at an auction and see an item that was hard to find and no one else had an idea what it even was.

So here is the story...I am at Bill Algees auction house and a box of plates about 3 or 4 in the box comes up. I notice that one is gold rimmed and marked southern pottery and have seen these sell for 7 or 8 dollars at the flea markets and another one has a picture of a train on it.

So bidding starts at 1 dollar and I win the box at 4...please note..had the gal bidding against me went 5, I would not have bid 6 for the box.

Now to this day, I do not recall what we did with the other plates in the box.

I get it home and start looking at the plate with the train on it...it is a litho of a train engine..an f7 diesel to be exact with several passenger cars behind it and the wording on the plate says route of the 600....so I immediately know this plate is something special but I'm not sure what.

I spend several days trying to search this and it leads me to an association of retired rr porters...now the best that they were able to help with was they thought it might be rr china off of a pre amtrak passenger train for the chicago and northwestern rr.

With only that to work with we went and listed it under rr china on ebay with no reserve and a starting price of 9.99

It closed 7 days later at 485 dollars!!

What it was is pre amtrak. Every rr had passenger trains and each rr also had 1 passenger train that was their premier train...the route of the 600 was the premier train for the c and nw and it stood for 600 miles in 600 minutes from chicago to st paul.

What made the plate so valuable is that almost all the passenger trains had dining cars...but the china on the premier trains was different from that on the regular trains, so where a rr might be running 50 passenger trains a day, there was only 1 premier train thus the rareness.

After that we were hooked and had 10 great years on ebay.

Because of all the changes that ebay has made I no longer sell or buy there...it was good while it lasted.
Thanks,
Dennis Lichtenwalter