Train Art

by Dan Cupper , Great Eastern Publishing, 184 pages .

In 1925 the Pennsylvania, the mightiest railroad in a country built by railroads, celebrated its pre-eminence by issuing a wall calendar featuring a painting called Speed and Security that showed the crack Broadway Limited pounding toward Chicago. Every year thereafter until 1958 the calendars appeared, each bearing a vigorous painting of the machines that incarnated the Pennsy’s—and, at that time, the nation’s—power. Because they were also reproduced on timetables by the million, these visions of transport triumphant made Grif Teller one of the country’s best-known painters. But he was by no means the only artist in the railroad’s employ, and his work and that of his colleagues are here sumptuously presented in a highly engaging book that illuminates two of the most American of all industries: railroads and advertising.