Scale Craft Boxes

Good assumption.  WWII killed the O Scale hobby, and only fragments survived to 1946.  The way I hear it, Elliott Donnelly was ordered to give up his train manufacturing and join his father full time in telephone book production.

The only thing that survived, to my knowledge, was the 4-8-4, produced for maybe a decade by CLW in the 1950s.

Here is a Scale Craft box - one of my favorites.  It was a gift from Si Simonton, one of Southern California's most famous O Scalers.

I believe that Scale Craft (located in Chicago???) was very active in the 1930's, producing lots of nice engine and box car kits, and they also made structure kits. Some of their engines made from kits were particularly well detailed and very nice. AFAIK, they were 2 rail products.  By the late 1940's the companies model RR activities were largely gone, but the scale market may not have been a large market even back then. I seldom come across Scale Craft products as they are quite old and were probably made in small numbers.

HI,

The boxes shown are from the pre-war (WW2) period.  The post war boxes for the same kits were all blue and longer/narrower boxes.  Scale-Craft made some very bad decisions after WW2 including changing its whole loco line.  This was never completed but it is a long story that has had threads here before.  They concentrated on OO scale after the war and the O scale prewar designed car line was eventually sold to Thomas Industries who had them available to around 1960.  The Loco tooling from before the war was not useable for many reasons, it was sold in turns to Central Loco Works, All Nation then Henry Pearce Tool Co.  Bob Stevenson may have parts of it now. Nothing was ever made.  The 4-8-4 was a post war design finished by CLW and now owned by Bob Stevenson.

J2M

This is the Scale Craft K4.  I believe they started producing these in 1929.  Tese models can be had for under $200, and often come with insulated wheels (but not always).

I have four of them - folks seem to just send them to me . . .

Hi Bob,

I have 2, they are great models especially if you add modern detail parts.  The original advertisements for them says they were introduced in Winter 1932-1933 at the time of the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago.  They are easy to modernize with a Pittman Can motor.

J2M

I think Scale-Craft had something to do with Lionel OO scale at one time. They may have made the OO gauge cars. Don

Scale Rail,

Nope.  Scale-Craft came out with OO well before Lionel who copied their cars and was sued for patent infringement by Scale-Craft.  Scale-Craft had patented their truck design and claimed copyright infringement for the cars which were nearly direct copies by Lionel. Lionel settled.  Rumor was that Lionel wasn't interested in reviving OO after WW2 as they didn't want to pay any royalties to Scale-Craft - I don't know if that part is really true.

J2M