A tip from blog reader Mike Nickel pointed me toward two recent articles on Scale-Craft published in The O Scale Resource, articles that may both be accessed online (linked in the text below). In spite being focused on their O gauge offerings, they both are fascinating, as both articles have content based on interviews and resources that I did not have access to writing my book.

Scale-Craft and their final Summit Avenue address

In the January/February 2014 issue we find an article by Glenn Guerra titled “Scale-Craft Working Models.” There are positives and negatives to the article. Early on (p. 18) there is an example of Scale-Craft post cards; these are news to me — sent out as advertising and I believe might be quite rare today. But on the following page the author seems to think OO is 1/8 inch to the foot which is not correct, that would be smaller than HO. Nevertheless, overall it is a good read focusing on the history of their operations.

The most interesting info comes toward the end of the article, which looks at Elliott Donnelley and the final years of Scale-Craft.

According to Art Miller, emeritus archivist of Special Collections at Lake Forest College, Elliott was very good with people. Art knew Elliott, and still has connections with the Donnelley family in Lake Forest. Elliott was Mayor of Lake Forest for a while, as well as a trustee and trustee chair of Lake Forest College during the 1960s. He would personally tutor trouble makers at the school, usually turning them around. Elliott was also a big benefactor to railroad history. The first storage building at the Illinois Railway Museum was financed by Elliott. The locomotive shop at the Mid Continent Museum was also financed by Elliott, and has a bronze plaque by the door. In Flint, Michigan, there is a narrow gauge D&RG 2-8-2 and cars that were once on the Donnelley estate in Lake Forest. Elliott was involved with the miniature train ride at the Brookfield Zoo west of Chicago. Elliott was also a collector of railroad material, which is now part of the Special Collection at Lake Forest College. So what does this have to do with Scale Craft?

In 1947, Elliott’s involvement with Scale Craft did not end. By 1950 Doug Douglas had floundered. The 1950 Scale Craft Data Book had an announcement from Elliott that he was back with Scale Craft. At this time, Scale Craft was still offering the O Scale line, as well as, the OO Scale line. The address of Round Lake, Illinois is west of where the Libertyville factory was. The O Scale line did not last long, and by 1951 Scale Craft was announcing that they were only going to produce OO Scale items. Note the apology to the customers in the 1950 Data Book introduction. This may have also been for the sake of Scale-Craft employees. The 1951 ad shows an address of 849 Summit Avenue in Lake Forest. When I was visiting Art Miller to look at the catalogues and other information at Lake Forest College, we went to see the Summit Avenue location. Summit Avenue is a two block long street with houses on one side of the street and a park on the other. Across the park from Summit Avenue is the Donnelley estate. Art told me that quite a few of the estate owners in Lake Forest owned homes for their help to live in. We suspect this was the case with Scale Craft, and that whoever was in charge of production, was now living in the house at 849 Summit Avenue.

Some hard truths after WWII

Which brings us to the other article, found in the September/October 2023 issue of The O Scale Resource, “Scale-Craft in the Post War Era: What Happened?” by Jay Morris. While focusing overall on changes and, in retrospect, poor decisions related to the O scale line, you can’t argue much with his analysis (p. 63) of where things stood for OO right after the war.

SC also saw an “opportunity”, namely they found out that Lionel would not be continuing their OO Scale line after World War II. SC had sued Lionel in the late 1930’s for quite obviously manufacturing nearly identical copies of the SC OO freight cars that SC introduced in 1937. Lionel settled the lawsuit and paid SC royalties on their OO sales. This might have influenced Lionel’s decision to discontinue the line; however, Lionel was probably also looking at Model Railroader magazine surveys that indicated that OO scale had crashed in popularity by 1945 and was in the low single digits as a percentage of active model railroaders. It is also likely that Lionel’s pre-war sales of OO Scale models were disappointing as both Lionel and Scale-Craft both further complicated issues by offering both A/C and D/C, 12-volt and 24-volt versions as well as 2 and 3 rail models in OO. This was at best confusing and was somewhat costly to produce. HO modelers had no such incompatibility issues to contend with.

So, while SC probably thought they could dominate in OO scale after 1945, they failed to consider that American OO scale was on its way to near oblivion. They bet on the wrong horse, one that never left the gate after World War II. There was also a virtual explosion of new 12 volt direct current HO models as well as the wide introduction of S scale models which are only slightly larger than OO scale models. Between HO and S Scale, there really was no room or justification left for OO scale.

And why exactly was Scale-Craft sold in late 1946?

Jumping forward a little in the Morris article, we get to the question of why Donnelley sold out in 1946. The problems were not all on the OO gauge side of the coin, there was a bit bigger picture.

Why was the line sold? Well, like so many stories, there was the official story and then there is what really happened. Officially, Donnelley stated in a full page ad in Model Railroader that he had to return full time to the family printing business, the RR Donnelley company. I have been told other stories over the years.

Bob Smith told me that Donnelley had spent a fortune on the new SC factory and on the new locomotive designs and decided that it just had to stop. The key problem was that the new O scale sprung frames and drivers didn’t fit together properly. Donnelley had paid for the manufacture of over 1,000 locomotive frames with drivers to fit – they didn’t. In addition, Elliott Donnelley was himself an avid OO modeler and just didn’t want to spend any more money on this O scale project. I have also been told that Donnelley’s young daughter died suddenly after some sort of accident. If this is true, then it is understandable that Donnelley would have lost interest in model railroading for an extended period.

That being another version of a story involving a child also mentioned in my book, specifically on page 219. The factory that cost a fortune was said at the time to have cost $75,000 – in today’s money, that would be something like 1.2 million dollars. But also the land value, all the equipment, all the salaries, the slow sales and low demand, it was all not good. (More info on the factory, seen below, and the story involving a child, may be found here).

In any case, the line was sold at that time and everything was moved to Hollywood! Or was it? Morris provides another interesting detail that I have wondered about in the following paragraph, “As far as I can tell, the SC model tooling never left Illinois and there was little or no new model production from 1947-1949.” The little or no production part was pretty obvious to me, but that the toolings never left Illinois makes a lot of sense too, especially in relation Donnelley later bringing the line back to Illinois. He certainly tried to make it work again (and did make the new locomotive frame design work on the OO scale 4-8-4!), but there clearly were difficulties, and eventually a decision was made to break up the line.

Breaking up was not easy to do

Jumping ahead a little in the article,

We have now arrived at the break-up of SC. In late 1950, Elliott Donnelley was either not interested, or at least, didn’t have sufficient time and the energy needed to reboot the company. He was likely upset with the Doug Douglas fiasco, the failure to finish the new O scale line and the recognition that [the] OO scale line was not selling. Elliott asked Bob Smith from Central Locomotive Works to step in and take over as they were both in the Chicago area. Bob already had a very positive reputation in the hobby from his work at the Museum of Science and Industry display. Bob told me that he seriously considered this opportunity, but having two young children and a full-time job at RCA, he couldn’t see his way to having sufficient time to run Scale-Crat and continue his own line of Central Locomotive Works models.

The decision was made to sell SC in pieces.

The article continues that “Thomas Industries purchased the freight car kits and associated stock.” These were the O scale line, of course, not OO, and they sold off this residual of the SC O scale line for many years. A bit later in the article we see that Bob Smith did eventually buy the O scale locomotive line, and ultimately, he did get a version of the 4-8-4 back in production. Which leaves us with the OO line. Morris reports that

A former factory employee of SC purchased the OO Scale line. I suspect it was sold for very little. The new owner placed a few small advertisements in MR and shipped existing kits before exiting and selling the OO scale line to Kemtron in the early 1950s. Kemtron had very little success in OO even though they introduced a GP7 diesel and a few newer pieces. Eventually, the line and its tooling were scrapped as interest in OO scale had faded out.

Poor choices and bad luck

Author Jay Morris offers these clear thoughts on why SC failed after WWII.

In summary, like so many things, there are several reasons for the company’s failure. Concentrating on OO Scale, building an expensive new factory, adopting an overly ambitious and complex spring leaf design for the post-war O scale models, a benighted failed sale to an under funded and inexperienced buyer, failure to reintroduce the pre-war line as a commercial bridge to the future and a failure to understand the developing post-war model railroading market both in O Scale/O gauge and in HO are the main ones that stand out. Any one of these bad decisions could have killed Scale-Craft but in combination they were clearly commercially deadly.

Like Morris, I wonder if the history of model railroading might have been different if SC had taken a different path after the war. The two main, new products for OO were the post-war version of the reefer and the 50-foot boxcar. Both were I think optimistic attempts to make a post-war style kit, but, objectively, they were not great kits and Donnelly had to have been losing significant money, especially in the era right after the war when they were in the new factory. And his personal enthusiasm for OO wasn’t going to make the lost market come back.

To close, I should mention that nothing in the above articles contradicts anything in my book as to the history of Scale-Craft, both just add interesting additional details and perspectives. I would welcome readers to check out my account as well (found in parts of three chapters of the book), thanking again Mike Nickel for pointing me toward these interesting articles, both well worth reading by anyone interested in Scale-Craft model trains.