it's cause it would have been a variant of something you could just order.
you could get the 94 with any option you wanted, not all of them were catalogued.
so you basically called or more likely wrote them a letter for a quote telling them what you wanted on your rifle.
stocks,sights,magazine,take-down, engraving, barrel type-length.
they'd figure it up and mail you an itemized price list.
you ordered what you could afford or wanted sent the check [or sometimes cash]and waited for it to come to the post office.
I don't think so. They did these in an actual separate serial number range for most of the life of the product, and they made 20,800-ish of them specifically like this before switching to the 55 designation.
The 55 gets a little more complicated because it was actually sold as a different model altogether, at first, continuing that number system. Then at some point toward the end it was both a separate catalog item AND, for some reason, had the serials re-integrated with the standard 1894 line until the model was discontinued altogether.
Even weirder, according to the book, the take down 1894, which is a very valuable gun, is actually a variant of this model, and made on this line, but it used standard 1894 serials.
What makes that especially weird to me is that the takedown is a valuable variant of the 1894, but it turns out it is actually a variant of the much less valuable proto-55 version.
Basically, this version started as a variant for a year or two, became a separate entity with the same name - but a different serial range, and after gaining its own model designation it somehow became a variant again - despite a different name.
Then, the takedown was its own weird situation.
