All Aboard!: Images from the Golden Age of Rail Travel [Paperback]

A wonderful soft back book of posters designed for instant nostalgia. I rather liked its comprehensiveness, mainly featuring US railroads but nicely chapters devoted to Canadian and European posters. Another nice touch is the inclusion of ads, baggage labels and several black and white photos.

Predictably the posters tend to feature the streamline diesels of the thirties and forties (certainly a lot easier for the illustrators) rather than the European style of picturing the destinations. The travelling experience was the selling point rather than getting somewhere quickly and this, by the late forties and fifties, was rather a lost cause as plane travel was slowly becoming commonplace. There is great 1958 photo of the General Motors Aerotrain on page fifty-four making a PR stop in San Diego, possibly the last true streamliner.

Most of the posters shown have a graphic rather than literal style though there is a stunning 1940 Santa Fe brochure cover that has an E8 somewhere west of the Rockies done in a very photo realist style. The last chapter Rails for Victory covers the WW2 years when railroads lost no opportunity in telling everyone they were doing their bit. There are couple of beautiful Dean Cornwell paintings used as calendar art by the Pennsylvania RR in 1943 and 44.

The European chapter has some excellent British posters issued before the railroads were taken over by the state in 1947. If these take your fancy have a look at Railway Posters 1923-1947 (ISBN 1856690148) a gorgeous book of over two hundred posters and quite remarkable because of the range of artistic styles that were used just to push train travel.

All Aboard is an easy-on-the-eye quick tour of rail posters. A more detailed look can be found in 'Travel by Train' (ISBN 0253341523) which cover 1870 thru 1950 with plenty of super graphic material and text.

This book covers railroad advertising from the early 1900s to the late 50s. All color art and a few B&W pictures showing the real trains that influenced the advertising. It shows examples of railroad advertising from posters, timetables, brochures and luggage tags as well as railroads in the US, Canada and Europe. There is a breif history introducing each chapter and the captions for each picture are descriptive and accurate. At the end of the book, there are a few pages explaining how to collect railroad art, which I found very informative. An easy read and very entertaining. An excellent coffee-table book.

As always, Chronicle Books beautiful graphic series has captured a wonderful look back at riding the rails. Johnson and O'Leary have compiled a romantic collection of railroad commercial art.