All Aboard!: Images from the Golden Age of Rail Travel [Paperback]

Lynn Johnson (Author), Michael O'Leary (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1999

Travel back to the wonder years of rail in this beautiful compendium of art and illustration. Through luggage labels, maps, posters, advertisements, promotional brochures, napkins, and other colorful ephemera, All Aboard! celebrates our romance with the railroad. Its pages provide a nostalgic look at rail travel as it used to be, from the exciting early days at the turn of the century through its heyday in the '30s and through World War II. Lynn Johnson and Michael O'Leary have collected hundreds of period images, from Deco-era logos that evoke the sleek, streamlined style of the day to wartime propaganda posters highlighting the muscularity of freight locomotives that transported weapons and tanks for American troops. All Aboard! also explores the art of the Orient Express and great European lines, the rugged rails of Canada, and exotic points abroad. This exciting new resource for train enthusiasts and everyone on the lookout for terrific images recreates the splendor of the modern locomotive era.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Lynn Johnson and Michael O'Leary's 'All Abroad!' captures the glory days of railroad travel. -- Vanity Fair

About the Author

Lynn Johnson is an executive for a major motion picture company.

Michael O'Leary is the editor for a national group of magazines and the author of numerous books. They both live in Southern California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 132 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; First Edition edition (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811817474
• ISBN-13: 978-0811817479
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 7.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #885,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sentimental Journey, February 24, 2000

By 

George R. Maxwell "gmax316" (Utah) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All Aboard!: Images from the Golden Age of Rail Travel (Paperback)

As always, Chronicle Books beautiful graphic series has captured a wonderful look back at riding the rails. Johnson and O'Leary have compiled a romantic collection of railroad commercial art.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Book for both Train and Art Lovers., July 30, 2001

By 

Jason Lee (Grosse Ile, MI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All Aboard!: Images from the Golden Age of Rail Travel (Paperback)

This book covers railroad advertising from the early 1900s to the late 50s. All color art and a few B&W pictures showing the real trains that influenced the advertising. It shows examples of railroad advertising from posters, timetables, brochures and luggage tags as well as railroads in the US, Canada and Europe. There is a breif history introducing each chapter and the captions for each picture are descriptive and accurate. At the end of the book, there are a few pages explaining how to collect railroad art, which I found very informative. An easy read and very entertaining. An excellent coffee-table book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Graphic motion, April 19, 2007

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All Aboard!: Images from the Golden Age of Rail Travel (Paperback)

A wonderful soft back book of posters designed for instant nostalgia. I rather liked its comprehensiveness, mainly featuring US railroads but nicely chapters devoted to Canadian and European posters. Another nice touch is the inclusion of ads, baggage labels and several black and white photos.

Predictably the posters tend to feature the streamline diesels of the thirties and forties (certainly a lot easier for the illustrators) rather than the European style of picturing the destinations. The travelling experience was the selling point rather than getting somewhere quickly and this, by the late forties and fifties, was rather a lost cause as plane travel was slowly becoming commonplace. There is great 1958 photo of the General Motors Aerotrain on page fifty-four making a PR stop in San Diego, possibly the last true streamliner.

Most of the posters shown have a graphic rather than literal style though there is a stunning 1940 Santa Fe brochure cover that has an E8 somewhere west of the Rockies done in a very photo realist style. The last chapter Rails for Victory covers the WW2 years when railroads lost no opportunity in telling everyone they were doing their bit. There are couple of beautiful Dean Cornwell paintings used as calendar art by the Pennsylvania RR in 1943 and 44.

The European chapter has some excellent British posters issued before the railroads were taken over by the state in 1947. If these take your fancy have a look at Railway Posters 1923-1947: From the Collection of the National Railway Museum, York a gorgeous book of over two hundred posters and quite remarkable because of the range of artistic styles that were used just to push train travel.

All Aboard is an easy-on-the-eye quick tour of rail posters. A more detailed look can be found in Travel by Train: The American Railroad Poster, 1870-1950 with plenty of super graphic material.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.