Ontario Vacationland

In 1961, Canadian National was finally using four-color photos to illustrate this six-panel brochure whose cover featured the yellow, green, and black color scheme of the railways streamlined trains. Ironically, soon after CN began using full-color advertisements, it repainted its trains to be black-and-white.

Click image to download a 3.7-MB PDF of this brochure.

The addition of color photography transformed CN advertising. Unlike previous booklets that relied heavily on text, this one seems to take the “one photo is worth a thousand words” adage to heart as it has more than a dozen photos accompanied by barely a dozen paragraphs of text. Unfortunately, this makes it a bit haphazard, which could have been corrected with a map. Without one, out-of-province readers would have no idea where any of the scenes in the pictures are located.


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