Ah yes, familial donations

The family just doesn't understand that you aren't interested in the Tyco Baby Ruth boxcar from the 70s, and the little Plymouth switcher isn't a valuable antique now... 

However!

Those gifts of obsolete and or otherwise unusable items show a desire to pass it forward rather than immediately dumping it in a landfill. It also expresses their desire to help you even if it doesn't turn out that way. And who knows, there may be a "gem" that makes it all worthwhile, sometime in the future.

If you have more mdel railroad equipment than you need

Sell off the excess.  Even old toy locomotives can be sold for $1.00.  A friend of mine likes to make what he calls "trash to treasure."  He will pick up and old toy freight car with talgo trucks.  He'll carve off grabs or ladders and install wire grabs, cut the couplers off the trucks and body mount Kadees.  He bends up his own grabs from wire.  He ends up with a nice freight car for almost nothing.  You might even be able to do the same thing yourself, and if you don't need or can't use the older stuff, sell it.  If you are not comfortable with doing kit bashing or mods, or even repainting, the old stuff makes good practice pieces.

Yes. Most of the donated cars

Yes. Most of the donated cars is a circus train my grand father scratch built in the 60's and 70's. I'll post some pictures soon.

Sounds like it's a time for a

Sounds like it's a time for a tear down and rebuild!  Assuming you are still a train nut and can't resist the schwartz!

The same problem

I have found myself with the same problem, having my kids come back home for a couple of years and an Ivy growing up through the concrete into the track work etc. The Ivy took 2 years to kill (ended up pouring sump oil down some holes i drilled). That fixed it.

    Now i have to pull it all apart and start again. Problem is , where to start ????

Rebuild

Yea, this time around I'll be able to model something I have the space for. The problem years ago was my son, then 7, now 17, wanted long consists. I have a very small pace: 7' x 11'. Now I can model that shelf layout I've always wanted featuring two or three places I have always liked: the ME Central / Saco & Bridgeton interchange at Hiram, Me. (so I can model Hon30 Maine narrow gauge), Ossipee Center, NH and Steep Falls, Me.

I once was able to go up to Harrison, Maine and made a traced copy of the original right of way blueprints for teh narrow gauge. 

Boy can I relate

There have been so many people that have come and gone from here that somehow I end up with all the stuff nobody wants to keep or ship. Now I find that I am constantly moving boxes of stuff from one side of the room to the other in order to make room to work on the layout. 

What about all the boxes of magazines? Literally hundreds that I haven’t opened in years. All the parts of the old layout are mostly in the dump but some sections I couldn’t bear to part with - like a long curves switch or a three way that hand laid. Dumb I suppose. 

 "Most of the donated cars is

That sounds like it could draw a lot of interest on ebay if he did a decent job of building it.  You also might offer it to the local club if it's good enough to use on their layout. The public eats that kind of stuff up on open house days......DaveB 

The big purge

The ah-ha moment for me came some years ago when my uncle was visiting - we were in the train room working on something with stuff in the way and he stood back and said something like “you know, if you got rid of half the stuff in this room, the other half of the stuff would be a lot more useable.”  I had to admit he was right.  So I set out to do that.

What became apparent over time is that although there may be a lot of people who say “oh, don’t throw that out” for any given item, there aren’t many people who will actually take it if it’s offered to them, and fewer still who will pay for it.  So unless you want disposing of stuff to be your only hobby, you need to be a bit ruthless and just chuck stuff that you can’t find a home for with “reasonable effort”, whatever that means for you.

A couple of Thoughts

Neal or anybody else with years of magazines piled up. I had MR from the mid 50's to about 2015 when I quit subscribing. 65 yrs of one mag + RMC+ Gazette+RMJ, MMR+ a few others. Best move I ever did was during allergy season one year when I couldn't do anything other then sneeze ect I started cutting them up and saving the articles I wanted. I suspect that if you added up all the mags I had It was between 150-200 yrs worth. I kept the Gazettes whole and the same with the N scale mags since those are really my wife's. Every thing else got condensed down to 18 binders of various sizes. Takes up less then 2 shelves on an average book case. I put the articles in plastic sleeves and if a series or covered the same MR I put it all in the same sleeve.

Getting rid of old stuff. Craigs List has a free section. A neighbor was moving and was in a hurry. Tried selling stuff on Craigs List and Facebook buy sell trade site and got tiered of the BS and people who just couldn't be bothered to read the ads. So he started putting it on the curb in a neat pile and took a few photos and posted on Craigs List. He said it always disappeared sometimes within minuets.

You can also try the LHS. Mine will buy just about anything including some Mags. Some thrift stores too.

Jack

did your grandfather do a nice job on the circus train?

Does it have any sentimental value to you as a memory of your grandfather?  If you wanted to keep the circus train, it might make a nice display on a shelf or even in a custom case to keep the dust off.  If it doesn't interest you, and won't offend the family if you get rid of it, then put it up on a site for sale.