For the last four months of 1950, Hill’s Railway Age covers came at a pace of one per month, plus a special Christmas cover on December 23.
A Chicago & North Western 400 train crosses the Mississippi River in this September 30 cover painting. Click image to download a 1.8-MB PDF of this magazine cover. This image is a from a Google scan.
Unlike many of the images shown yesterday, this one of a Chicago & North Western passenger train appears to be relatively conventional. Yet the river is yellow, the clouds are pink, and the picture is framed by a cave high on some cliff. Is there anywhere on the North Western where such a cave might be found? Hill’s signature is in the lower left.
A Seaboard Air Line streamliner passes by a Florida orange grove in this image from Greg Palumbo’s collection of Kudner ad proofs. Click image to download a 2.8-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here for a 24.8-MB higher-resolution version of this PDF.
Another image that doesn’t appear to have been taken from an orbiting satellite. Yet compare it with the 1949 cover below showing the same train.
A Seaboard Air Line streamliner passes by a Florida orange grove. Click image to download a 2.0-MB PDF of this magazine cover that was scanned by Google.
The anonymous 1949 artist mistakenly made the stainless steel passenger cars the same colors as the locomotive. Aside from that the 1949 image makes the locomotive as important as the orange grove, which would make people today worry that their oranges are polluted by Diesel fumes. Hill’s painting makes the train a modest part of the landscape, a comforting notion today when everyone worries about the environmental impacts of everything they do.
Hill’s signature isn’t visible on the cover of the 1950 painting. However, as will be described in more detail later, in about 1953 General Motors issued a series of more than 30 posters featuring Bern Hill’s work. Signature or not, any painting on one of these posters was by Bern Hill. This was made into a poster so is indubitably by Hill.
A St. Louis Terminal train passes under the magnificent Eads Bridge in this cover scanned by Google books. Click image to download a 1.8-MB PDF of this magazine cover.
Hill’s November cover shows a modest Terminal Railroad of St. Louis train passing under the Eads Bridge crossing the Mississippi River. No signature is visible and the Terminal Railroad wasn’t important enough to have a poster made of this painting, so the assumption that the painting is by Hill is based on the artist’s style.
A General Motors GP-7 pulls a freight train by a mountain reminiscent of the one in the California Zephyr painting. Click image to download a 1.8-MB PDF of this magazine cover based on a Google scan. Click here to download a 1.6-MB PDF of a cover showing Hill’s signature.
General Motors ads usually featured recent sales of locomotives to specific railroads or the success stories of those locomotives. But to wish customers Season’s Greetings, GM did “non-commercial” commercials featuring a recent GM locomotive pulling a train through some winter landscape. There is no signature on the Google image of this cover, but when libraries bind magazines together they often trim the edges to make them even. A copy I found at the University of Oregon Library wasn’t trimmed as heavily and shows the top part of Hill’s signature near the lower left corner.
The locomotives of a Northern Pacific freight train are framed by the horse’s legs in this image from Greg Palumbo’s collection of Kudner ad proofs. Click image to download a 2.8-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here for a 25.0-MB higher-resolution version of this PDF.
The last Railway Age of 1950 featured this painting of a cowboy riding a horse near the Northern Pacific Railway. The locomotives in NP’s passenger scheme are pulling a freight train, but that doesn’t detract from the drama of the image. Unfortunately, it isn’t signed and no poster was made of this cover painting.
A GP-7 with a GM logo sits in a freight yard in this August Railway Age cover scanned by Google. Click image to download a 1.4-MB PDF of this magazine cover.
For comparison, the above cover incorporates an image that was used by GM twice in 1950: first on August 19 and again on October 7. The signature on the image isn’t clear but may be “Blaine.” In any case, it isn’t Bern Hill and the style is nothing like Hill paintings in 1950. Starting in 1954, Hill would show that he could do paintings like this one, but his covers of 1950 through 1953 focused on the landscapes rather than the locomotives. Tomorrow I’ll show some of his 1951 cover paintings.