If Bern Hill did 46 paintings for General Motors before the end of 1952, why did GM only print posters for 31 of them? Greg Palumbo suggests that “the posters were limited to customers who were either going to or had recently ordered locomotives.”

This image is from the Palumbo collection. Click image to download a 6.8-MB PDF of this poster.

This might explain why the Union Pacific painting didn’t make the cut. At least for freight, UP was a reluctant adaptor of Diesels, preferring its Big Boys and other steam and, in 1952, beginning its experiments with gas turbines built by Alco and General Electric.

This image is from the Palumbo collection. Click image to download a 5.0-MB PDF of this poster.

On the other hand, Missouri Pacific was Dieselizing as fast as it could. Other than a handful of Alco passenger locomotives, all of the Diesels it has purchased by 1952 were General Motors products.

Click image to download a 4.9-MB PDF of this poster.

Likewise, Santa Fe bought a few Alco passenger locomotives, but its Diesel roster greatly emphasized GM locos. It was the first railroad to order FT locomotives in 1939.

Click image to download a 3.6-MB PDF of this poster.

However, when Burlington and Western Pacific bought GM locomotives to power the California Zephyr, Rio Grande purchased Alco passenger locomotives. GM still made a poster out of this painting.

Click image to download a 2.4-MB PDF of this poster.

The colors of the above four images are reasonably close to the colors of the original posters.

Click image to download a 3.4-MB PDF of this poster.

The Railway Age cover of this painting is darker than shown here, but images I’ve seen of the poster are more like this one.

Click image to download a 4.2-MB PDF of this poster.

Getting the colors right on the Jersey Central poster was difficult. When I tried to adjust the colors of the sky, it changed the locomotive’s orange to a yellow color. The final product here is pleasing even if it doesn’t exactly match the original.