We have all heard of Raymond Loewy, and his designs of the the GG1, S and T1 locomotives. Have you ever seen him speak?

There is an interview with him in this Canada National Film Board documentary at 6:00.

https://youtu.be/_kYA5mGWNgo?si=_dSzkrF-w8kAZ3Vx

Well, I got around to looking at this, and it's a fun film. It's amazing some of the things that came from the Canadian National Film Board around that time, including some rail films. It makes you wonder how, with few exceptions (O. Winston Link comes to mind) we had so little along these lines then, despite what could have been some excellent material. In fact, overall, it seems everybody else--the British, the Australians (see "A Steam Train Passes"), the Japanese (see the two videos that appeared here a while back)--all did late steam era films with more sensitivity, more "heart," than almost anything here.

Of course, while this isn't rail oriented as such, I find it says, with humor, that maybe we needed modern rail or transit then, as we still do. . .and curiously, it does so without actually saying so!

In regard to Mr. Loewy, one thing that stands out just from watching him is that he looks like he may have had a stroke at some point. Part of his face doesn't look like the other, and it seems only half of it is working. Rod Sterling, the famous TV writer, had a face that did the same thing after he had a stroke; you can see this when you compare his introductions for "The Twilight Zone" (late 1950s-early 1980s) with those of in "Night Gallery" (early 1970s); the stroke had hit him in the late 1960s or early 1970s, between the times of the two programs.

I'll add that I'm glad both men apparently recovered.
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Mentioning that some people, including myself, think we took a wrong turn in terms of transportation policy, it seems appropriate to add this General Electric film from 1952. Yes, it's still fun, and it even has a bit of the same humor used in the Canadian film eight years later!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alMQmQsC6gU

And it leaves out a ridiculous amount of highly-important details... at a date the Pacific Electric, probably the closest to a pervasive electric surface transit system any city has developed, was already disappearing. There was a sort of trolleybus equivalent in Memphis... they're all gone now. And even the most frequently scheduled routes have enormous inherent delays now for any of the lengths of trip that would be effectively competitive with automobile operation and convenience... for a cramped seat, or increasingly dubious cleanliness, and a walk in whatever weather to many places 'people' would want to go.

What this is actually addressing is commuting, but note that commuter heavy rail is almost entirely absent... perhaps because GE didn't have much of a dog in that fight in 1952. It would be about a decade and a half before public money would come to be thrown in necessary amounts at high-capacity rail, and at the necessary 'free' automobile access and storage to make much of it work in the days of station wagon trips morning and night. By that time most of the high-capacity private 'streetcars' and of course the longer-distance interurbans, were mostly gone, and what replaced them is hopelessly incapable of making much unsubsidized operating profit... let alone cover the mentioned cost of maintenance, safe operation, and all that rail in the streets and 'private rights-of-way'. And insurance for everyone not paying attention and winding up in a patent car fender or whatever.

We had an answer to all that when I went to college in the mid-Seventies. It was called PRT, and it was specially designed to 'move people' more effectively. At the cost of three levels of concrete guideway linguini wrapped all through those downtowns, and more-or-less electricity-wasteful algorithms to move all the little "automobile-size" people-mover vehicles around to where someone needed them without congesting things for the people having to get somewhere. We are only now, in the last half-decade or so, actually getting to where autonomous vehicles can handle the scheduling... at some point in the future, perhaps even before we get fusion electricity 'too cheap to meter'. (/s)

I'm tempted to say that the actual answer to much of this was actually something GE could have participated in -- along with Ford and Edison -- just prior to WWI, when the idea was to make very small and light "buggy-like" vehicles for even four-seat cars with load-carrying capacity, and run then mondestructively over the developing 'good roads' that were beginning to be seen as public advantage to provide 'free for use'. If you think this was hopelessly primitive, I remember a car Chrysler produced, which had siz seats and a large trunk, but was built to light-construction standards (a bit like a big Honda Insight) and had a diesel powerplant that gave it over 70mpg. Admittedly you'd probably be safer driving a beer can. Which was part of the problem, then and now.