Vintage Railroad Posters and Advertising

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Almost immediately after the final spike was driven into the 1,912-mile First Transcontinental Railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, marketers began producing posters and other advertising materials designed to lure farmers and...
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Almost immediately after the final spike was driven into the 1,912-mile First Transcontinental Railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, marketers began producing posters and other advertising materials designed to lure farmers and entrepreneurs living east of the Mississippi River to the Wild West. This sort of marketing effort was hardly unique to the United States. On November 7, 1885, when Canadians celebrated the completion of their nation’s even longer transcontinental railroad at Craigellachie, British Columbia, luring settlers west via advertising was deemed an essential part of nation-building. Indeed, executives of the Canadian Pacific Railway relied so heavily on graphic design, by the 1930s they had made room for a dedicated silkscreen studio within Montreal’s railway station, where posters and other materials were cranked out by the thousands. Similarly, half a world away in New Zealand, that nation’s Railways Department set up its own Railways Studios in 1915, defining the look of outdoor advertising in the country for more than half a century. But unlike in the United States and Canada, where the initial task was to encourage settlement, the goals for the posters that came out of Railway Studios were always about getting New Zealanders to explore their multi-island nation by rail. That last part was especially important because between World War I and World War II, New Zealand had become one of the most car-crazy countries in the world. But the artists hired by Railways Studios did such a good job of encouraging the public to take their weekend getaways by train that attendance at churches actually suffered. Stylistically, railroad posters have varied by region. The posters produced by London’s Underground during the 1920s and ’30s used Art Deco to lure residents and tourists alike to flowers in Kew Gardens, theaters in the West End, and the city’s famous zoo. During the same period, Art Deco was given an air of mystery in the...
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