With seventeen paintings in one year, many were closely scheduled. Yesterday I noted that Hill had three in the month of August, while today’s first painting is from a Railway Age dated just one week after the last of yesterday’s paintings.
A Rio Grande passenger train passes through the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River. This and all other images today are from Greg Palumbo’s collection. Click image to download a 1.6-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here for a 7.1-MB higher-resolution version of this PDF.
The sky is unusually red considering that the westbound Royal Gorge passenger train was scheduled to pass this spot at about 1:30 pm. No signature is visible but only Hill would use a red sky for a midday train.
A Frisco freight train threads its way through a dense concentration of Texas oil wells. Click image to download a 3.4-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here for a 10.4-MB higher-resolution version of this PDF.
The scene in this image appears to be Kilgore, Texas, once known for having the world’s greatest concentration of oil wells. However, Kilgore was on the Missouri Pacific, not the Frisco, so Hill may have thought there were lots of scenes in Texas like this. The artist’s signature was cropped out of the cover image.
A Milwaukee Road passenger train passes beneath Mount Rainier. Click image to download a 2.1-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here for an 8.8-MB higher-resolution version of this PDF.
Mount Rainier may have been visible from Milwaukee Road passenger trains, but it did not truly loom over the rail route as depicted in this painting. The painting doesn’t even get the Milwaukee’s colors right: it shows a dark train with a red or orange stripe below the windows while the real colors at the time were maroon at window level with orange stripes above and below the windows. Yet the scene is nevertheless highly inviting. No signature is visible.
A passenger train is barely visible outside the bell tower of this church. Click image to download a 2.5-MB PDF of this painting from Gregory Palumbo’s collection.
For the Christmas Eve, 1951, edition of Railway Age, Hill painted the inside of a church bell tower with a snowy scene and a bright star visible out the window. I don’t have a good image of the magazine cover, but this is from the original painting. Hill’s signature is near the lower right corner.
A Louisville & Nashville passenger train crossing the Green River in Kentucky. Click image to download a 2.7-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here for a 10.7-MB higher-resolution version of this PDF.
On the last day of the year — and just a week after the Christmas Eve issue — Railway Age‘s cover showed this Louisville and Nashville train crossing a high bridge. The painting is probably supposed to represent the bridge across the Green River at Munfordville, Kentucky, but there is a lot of vertical exaggeration and the pillars in the painting look like they were built a lot more recently than 1859. No signature is visible but Greg Palumbo has the original artwork in his collection so we know it was by Bern Hill.