Bern Hill Vintage Travel Poser

Santa Fe - the Chief Way
Graphic Design by Bern Hill
Published circa 1950's


Route of the Silver Fleet
Graphic Design by Bern Hill
Published circa 1950's

Bern Hill was a graphic designer and a painter. "At the end of 1949, General Motors' Electro-Motive Division embarked on a rather radical advertising campaign which included vertical format streamline style paintings for the covers of Railway Age [Magazine]" (Vintage Rails, January / February 1998, p. 64). Between 1950 and 1956 Hill created sixty-five paintings for the campaign. "Electro-Motive also produced a series of very high-grade posters of Hill's paintings that were overwritten by the marketing theme for that particular railroad . . . it is unknown if all 65 paintings were turned into posters. . . . Hill's assignment was to portray the 'feel' of each railroad in a scene that often captured the landscape of the individual road and gave the viewer the sense of that road's missions -- freight, passenger or switching" (Railroad Heritage, No. 6, 2002, p. 10).