Gentlemen, a curiousity question. Are you aware of any of the museums ever having done a display or hosted a presentation on the publicity, advertising, and sales materials used in the campaigns to advertise and sell diesel locomotives? If you know of any examples of this, were they for a single builder or the builders in general?

And I would like to add to my earlier posting this question: Is the topic of locomotive advertising and sales campaigns of much interest to those in the locomotive preservation "community" or is it something to just be ignored until it is lost and forgotten?

This is a much overlooked thing and further applies to the entire analysis of all the business practices of the locomotive industry. When he wrote "From Steam to Diesel", Albert Churella remarked that there was a dearth of published literature on the subject. This is especially true in the diesel ERA, where GM brought the full arsenal of its agressive consumer-seeking marketing prowess to bear in promoting a revolutionary standardized product.Prior to that marketing was not as nearly as important, since ALCO-BALDWIN-LIMA triopoly were BUILDERS of custom products, not producers and there were very definite brand loyalties (think of D&H and Alco and NKP and Lima). We tend to think of the failure of the Big 3 legacy builders as implicitly a failure to master a new technology, but it was in great part a failure to conduct business in a way more compatible with a volume oriented, standardized product. One can just imagine how the executive offices of the Big Three must of reacted when they heard that Richard Dilworth was telling the railroads that you pick a gear ratio and a color and thats it. For decades they had built locomotives with heavy design input, if not total specification from the railroads. I have a Baldwin sales brochure (post 1950), which clearly shows, based upon the proliferation of model types- that Baldwin failed to grasp the realities of the new market. (RF-16, AS-16, AS-416, AS-616, S-8, S-12, RT-624). Baldwin was offering models to cover every possible use, failing to understand that due to diesel flexibility, the focus needed to be on a few well-built models, produced in the highest volume possible, especially for a firm that had lost its place in the market and needed to retrench. The RT-624 and AS-416 were models searching for a need and the design of the RF-16 was a waste, since the cab unit era was soon to be over and EMD and, to a lesset extent, ALCO had that market segment locked up, with E's, F's, FA's and PA's.There are very few examples of industrries where there ENTIRE market is overthrown by new entrants. Usually SOMEBODY "gets it", in the way the Burroughs Adding Machine Company became Unisys. In this industry, everybody followed Victor, to continue the analogy.

Thanks for an excellent response. The question I asked was presented to me by the staff at a library in a medium size city with a strong railroad heritage. They were interested in finding out about any available presentations on this subject. I thought it was a rather interesting question since I do not recall any museums having done anything with this particular segment of locomotive history. It is in fact "do-able" as a presentation. So the question becomes one of whether it is worth trying to put together something on this subject, and if enough people are interested in this area of railroad history to justify the time and effort.

My current research does not directly examine the topic of diesel locomotive advertisements - but it does use them as supporting evidence in a larger study of the environment into which diesel locomotives were introduced. There is a bit of literature on this particular topic, however much of it is rather narrow in its focus on the business aspects and technology aspects of the railroad industry and the larger significance of this story is lost as a result.http://www-personal.umich.edu/~tcornill/lecture.htmlTom Cornillie

Not exactly an answer to the original question, but if you want to see a whopping artifact from the GM sales campaign, and a very nifty restoration story besides, search on GM Futurliner for the web site of the Futurliner restoration project of the National Auto and Truck Museum of Auburn, Indiana.This thing was one of 12 bus-like monster portable stages built by GM to transport the GM Parade of Progress to towns around the country in the early 1950's. Each of these 2-axle 8-wheeled (!) vehicles opened into a stage or exhibit covering a different topic of technology for sale by GM, such as autos, Frigidaire reefers and air-conditioners, small Diesels, and EMD locomotives. Others had soft-sell science education themes. Some of the pictures on the web site show the locomotive sales-pitch display, featuring cross sections of a 567 and the Train of Tomorrow. If you went to the Museum of Science and Industry at Chicago any time in the 1960's, you may remember these exhibits ("Our friend, the Roots blower") some of which were installed there for quite a while.This traveling show must have been one of the last great gasps of pre-mass-media corporate relations, when visual communications had to be done in person rather than over TV. Many of the Futurliners survive, but this seems to be the only full restoration. There is talk of reuniting the bus with the sole surviving intact exhibit from the Chicago museum, the model of a road intersection over time that shows the impact of auto roads on land development. I recall this very well from the Museum. Today, some would call this urban sprawl, but it looked like the road to the future in 1954.This restoration project was farmed out by the Museum to a group of volunteers operating out of a tractor shed outside Zeeland, Michigan, and proves that this kind of thing can work for small museums given a quality project manager and volunteers (in this case, many GM employees and retirees). The pictures of acres of rusty sheet metal being replaced will be familiar to anyone who ever performed surgery on a Pullman-Standard lightweight. The restored vehicle is beginning to be shown around, and it seems that I missed seeing it at the Coopersville and Marne tourist line by one week. Oh, well.

The EMD exhibit carried on the right side of one of the Futurliners included shallow mock-ups of part of an F-unit, a GP, and a switcher all painted in appropriate EMD paint schemes. The GP was "backed" out of the way to reveal a rolling story screen that was framed by the F-unit and the switcher. This was a reel-to-reel type display screen that told the story of EMD diesel locomotives. The left side of the vehicle carried a display by GM Diesel Power that showed the uses of diesel engines in industry and government.It just happens that one of the color photos on the Futurliner website is of the Futurliner with the EMD display.