In the 1940s, General Motors did a series of ads that compared railroading in the nineteenth century with modern railroading using GM Diesels. Because some, though not all, of the ads used Courier & Ives prints to show the nineteenth century view, these were sometimes called Courier and Ives ads. GM also made a series of posters using the images, but not the text, of these ads.

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For example, above is a Courier & Ives print called “The Express Train.” That print was incorporated into the advertisement and poster shown below. The ad featured a Santa Fe FT Diesel and mentions the war so must have been published in the early 1940s.

Click image for a larger view. Click here to download a 6.5-MB PDF of nearly 20 GM ads featuring “old and new” railroading images. Images are the largest I could find and don’t necessarily reflect actual sizes in inches.

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GM incorporated a Courier & Ives print called “American Express” into a 1943 ad featuring a Western Pacific Diesel.

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As a third example, Courier & Ives did a print called “American ‘Express’ Train” that GM incorporated into an ad showing a Seaboard Air Line diesel.

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Not all of the ads were based on Courier & Ives prints. This ad featuring Missouri Pacific Diesels used a painting that we’ve previously seen from the Missouri Pacific Museum in St. Louis that was probably done by Frank Nuderscher.

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At least one ad didn’t even compare a nineteenth-century train with a modern train. A 1944 ad instead compared a recent Burlington Diesel with the original Burlington Zephyr.

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All of the poster images and some of the ads were provided by Greg Palumbo.