This 1939 brochure unfolds into a massive 24″x33″ sheet that has slightly more space than one of Canadian National’s 20-page booklets. CN issued many 16- to 24-page booklets covering similar material, including one with the same name as this in 1940. Those booklets were much easier to read, so I have to wonder why they published this one as a brochure (which it did for several years before 1939 as well).

Click image to download an 11.4-MB PDF of this brochure.

The brochure’s nearly three dozen black-and-white photos are overpowered by the highly saturated colors of the dozen illustrations, one of which is signed “Simpson.” That probably refers to Charles Walter Simpson (1878-1942), a Montreal landscape painter who, as we saw a few months ago, did work for Canadian Pacific as well as Canadian National.

Simpson’s cover art, shown above, is clearly based on a black-and-white photo that is on the backside of the brochure. The artist has exaggerated the vertical incline of the rocks to the right of the train and placed the train a little closer to Mount Robson than in the photo. The one color photo in the brochure, showing that CN was just beginning to catch up with CP (which had color photos in its advertising as early as 1936), is also on the cover showing the view from a CN steamship on its way to Skagway.