A recent eBay purchase confirmed something I had wondered, did Walthers actually produce OO decals that differed from their HO decals?

Exhibit “A” is this boxcar I built up, this photo being taken for a 2008 article. In that article it is shown with two other vintage Scale-Craft boxcars. The other two cars date to the late 1930s and were beautifully built up with the earlier style of S-C decals. 

On this car above however I used a vintage set (1950s) of Walthers HO decals, thinking they seemed a little small but worked OK. Well, surprise surprise, they match exactly the decals in this package of Scale-Craft decals and a second package of the same decals. They also don’t match the size or style of the lettering in the drawing that came with them the decals being undersized and different, but the S-C/Walthers OO decals match my HO Walthers decals perfectly.

The additional good news is these pre-war “OO” decals look to be completely usable today. I look forward to using them at some point in the near future, I would most like at this point to make a set of three of these authentic, “new” vintage boxcars (I like sets of cars), but will need to do some paint stripping and prep first.