Steve Jr. did not stop at switch kits. He engineered the stapling of rail to fiber track, invented the first practical rail joiner, and developed pre-assembled turnouts and flexible track -- innovations that seem small until you consider what came before them. In the early days of the hobby, modelers built everything from scratch: bending rail by hand, soldering joints, fabricating their own switches. Schaffan's products turned model railroading from a craft requiring metalworking skills into something anyone could set up on a tabletop. The family business outgrew the garage, then the basement. In 1947, the first Atlas factory went up at 413 Florence Avenue in Hillside, New Jersey. The Atlas Tool Company was incorporated on September 30, 1949.

Atlas remained a track manufacturer for two decades before pivoting in 1968 to its first locomotives: N scale USRA Pacifics and Mikados, manufactured by Rivarossi in Italy. By 1970, the company was importing Baltimore and Ohio saddletank switchers -- the charming little engines modelers call Docksiders -- and EMD diesels made by Roco in Austria. HO scale followed in 1975, and complete train sets appeared in the 1970s using Roco diesels paired with Athearn freight cars. In 1983, a partnership with Japan's Kato Precision Railroad Models produced an Alco RS-3 in N scale that raised the bar for fine-scale fidelity across the entire hobby. That same year, Stephan Schaffan Jr. died. He was posthumously inducted into the Model Railroad Industry Association's Hall of Fame in 1985 and the National Model Railroad Association's Pioneers of Model Railroading in 1995.

In the early 1990s, the Atlas Tool Company renamed itself Atlas Model Railroad Company, Inc., acknowledging the transformation that had been underway for decades. A separate entity, Atlas O, LLC, was established in 1997 under James J. Weaver to focus on O scale products. After Weaver's death in 2011, Atlas O became a wholly owned subsidiary and was merged back into the parent company in 2012. Atlas continued absorbing other hobbyist brands -- Industrial Rail assets from Hobbico in 2006, Branchline Trains tooling in 2011, select MTH Trains O scale molds and River Point Station N scale vehicle tooling in 2021.

Stephan Schaffan's daughter Diane and her husband Tom Haedrich led Atlas until 2013, when Paul Graf became CEO. The company's new chief operating officer, Jarrett Schaffan Haedrich, is the great-grandson of founder Stephan J. Schaffan Sr. -- the fourth generation of the family to work in the business that began in a Newark garage. Atlas now offers three product tiers: Master for the highest detail and price, Classic for older but affordable molds, and Trainman for newer budget-friendly designs. From Hillside, a small town tucked between Newark and Elizabeth, the company continues to ship tiny replicas of the real-world railroads that once defined northern New Jersey's industrial landscape.