In April and May of 1945 we have a couple of the most curious advertisements ever run in the model railroad press. I first noticed these two ads years ago and found them puzzling. They are certainly worthy of a closer look and ran in MR and MC.

This scan is of the April ad in MR (the May ad is of another scene), which is a little large for the bed of my scanner but you get the gist certainly. Varney is in short trying to drum up support for taller rail in HO, what would have been in modern terms Code 120 instead of Code 100, which would solve the perceived problem of spike heads working up and causing derailments.

Varney was famous for HO scale products, but what is really puzzling is the models are Scale-Craft OO gauge models, not HO! These are photos on the OO Birmingham & Glencoe layout of Sid Wells, who in a prior article was described as an “artist, ad-man, executive” by Temple Nieter. What possessed Varney to use OO models in their advertising I have no idea, but perhaps he was friends with Wells, or Wells was the ad man responsible for the idea.  

The idea to use larger rail in HO was not well received. Spike heads working loose is an extremely small problem, and HO rail was overscale enough already. What the public wanted was better track products.