No doubt it was staged and sanctioned by the C&A Ry.
However, even if it was staged, I don’t think it is a moot point to ask whether or not the actual act of letting an unauthorized person run the train was against the rules.
If it were not a rules violation, staging it raises no question about it. However if it was a violation, then staging it (as an advertisement) is completely inexplicable. So whether or not it was a violation is not a moot point, but rather it is the very heart of the mystery here.
OK, here’s my two cents. I had some exposure to advertising, but it was never my cup of tea. One of the things I learned was:
If you want to attract men, show men.
If you want to attract women, show women and babies.
Yes, it’s sexist - but it’s what worked.
A newer rule is: If you can get a dog in to your ad, do it.
If the old C&A would have run the ad without the woman the thinking would have been that women wouldn’t give the ad much of a glance. Put a woman in there and they’ll look. It’s been my experience that women get their say in things. And I’ll wager that was true in 1903.
Some bright ad agency guy had a good idea and I’ll further wager that it sold tickets.
I think that holds water. Generally, I would conclude that the woman was essential to the ad concept and message. I would also guess that what the ad is suggesting was definitely against the rules, but the company just looked the other way. They probably said, “Hey, why sweat the small stuff? This is only 1903.”
Of course it was staged. Of course it was advertising. Of course sex was the seller. Of course management knew what it was and went along with it. When I first got into media a newspaper editor told me that to sell papers put a picture of a woman, a kid, a baby or a housepet on the front page. The same holds true for advertising. The idea here was to catch one’s eye with an attention getting figure of a woman in a place you would not expect her. It was probably used once in an ad or something but became popular enough that the image was reused in other applications. The Chessie Cat was a good example, used once but became so popular and identifyiable it be came a trademark. This image is consistant with images used at the time and presented in a manner also consistant with the times. Without seeing the original in hand, and even then it might be impossible, no one can really tell whether that picture was posed or made up in the dark room. But so what either way? It was a good image designed to catch one’s attention, so good in fact it has caught our attention over 100 years later!
"This is a railroad advertisement built around the romance of a serious rules violation. It does not make any difference whether or not the event actually happened or whether the violation actually occurred. "
-Ouch, bycryus. What railroad do you run on? I want to know, so I can be sure not to even come across your train! Safety? In the 1900s? Do you remember how the railroads were run, how passenger railcars were built, and other such stuff? Back then, I don’t recall safety even being #1, like it is today. I doubt they’d have thought much of anything of this back then. These days, I’m surprised deer don’t get ticketed for crossing on railroad property.
BTW, what about the engineer-for-a-day programs that exist today? Wouldn’t those be same violations? The person running the loco has nothing more than a crash course in the operations. What about that? To me, these types of operations today directly equal this, as does every training session behind the throttle.
Kolechovske…Your assessment of safety and how it was viewed back this is wrong, crews and management knew what they had to do to stay alive and what was foolish or dangerous activity. Maybe there weren’t as many specific rules, but they knew. And the Engineer for a Day programs are well supervised, planned, and insured, quite different than just inviting one up for a cab ride and letting them “run” the train. Clearly this picture…photo or artwork or?..does not depict such a planned instruction.
And, yes, everybody, this piece was intended for some kind of advertising…whether it was to capitalize on the “romance” of the rails theme, or to get the attention of men, or to play to the upcoming emancipation of women, we can’t tell from here. I would like to know where and how often the image appeared, in what specific medium (newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, timetable, poster, whatever else there might have been at that time). We can speculate all we want, rant and rave over its rules violation, or whether or not anybody of importence approved or disapproved or should have. It is a great example of the then state of the art advertising and printing technolog and philosophy, and has to be first judged on that merit. And we all know advertising people, like other media people, know nothing about railroads and railroading, do we?
I know this is different from the Engineer for a Day programs in setup by a good bit, but how is it that much different? It looks like the lady is well supervised. Yes, by only one man, but still, it seems to be adequate supervision. I also notice my last post didn’t finish correctly. It did the quoteokay, but showed nothing that I wrote afterward. Strange that these forum issues seem to comes in waves for me. I don’t remember what I had said, either.
The engineer for a day program is to allow an individual to actually operate a locomotive and run a train. This picture only indicates a figure of a lady sitting in a seat in a steam locomotive and had her picture taken with the engineer, there is no real indication the train was running at the time or that she was really operating a locomotive. This was only a public relations or advertising posed picture for use by the railroad…nothing more.
I know that…but I meant in regards to what it was suggesting. Even if it would have been a woman there with the engineer, regardless of whether or not the train was moving, how would her scenerio really be any different from the Engineer for a Day runners, in terms of qualified crew being with her?
The question about the photo is not a matter of what actually happened in making the photo, but what the photo depiction is intended to represent. So you have to look at this photo through the eyes of the general public seeing it presented to them as an advertisement for rail travel circa 1900.
They will instantly realize that having a well-dressed young woman at the throttle of a passenger locomotive with the engineer at her side obviously coaching her is an anomaly.
They are not going to conclude that this was a depiction of an engineer-for-the-day event set up as official company policy. Likewise they are not going to conclude that this photo was made to represent a woman posing with the engineer on a stationary locomotive just to make it look like she is driving the train (even though that was probably what actually occurred in the making of the photo).
Bucyrus, to say that the public viewed the engineer as the owner of the train in 1903 is almost an understatement. Yes, they thought he owned the train, was lord and master of the iron horse, but they also figured the hogger to be the first assistant to the president of the road, if not the president himself! A railroad engineer was the pinnacle of the American labor pool, no mere mortal but rather Zeus on steel wheels and rails, the equivelant of a super rock star in our society of today.
I just see this picture as a rather whimsical metaphor for “Trust us. We’ll take good care of you.” Sort of like saying that you’re in good hands with a certain insurance company.
Couldn’t figure out how to post a pic so I had to make it my avatar…please note pic of Miss Phoebe Snow ahead of the engineer in the Lackawanna Camelback circa 1910. The pic is from the DL&W archives at Syracuse University and was published in an Easton-Allentown newspaper this week. Though captioned as having been taken in Scranton, I would venture it could have been anywhere on the DL&W during that publicity shoot. There is a wonderful group of pictures taken at Denville, NJ on track 2 on the Boonton Line at the station in which Phoebe is posed upon and alongside the engine…so… if only because it is my hometown…I have a gut feeling the pic here was shot at Denville and not Scranton. However, that all being said, it is an example of how, at the time, railroads learned to use the femanin figure to grace their publicity and advertising to catch the eye of the populace about the cleanliness and friendliness of railroading as the mode of travel…just do in on my railroad.
Hell, Tree! I barely got the sense to get on here as is. URL, ahhh…mmmm…errrr…aaahh, I know it’s an internet term but don’'t reckon I really know what it means. Is that the newspaper’s web address?
Go to the website where you found the image and then click in the address box at the top of the window. The whole line of text there should change to a light color text on a dark background, (indicating that it is “Selected”… if it doesn’t “highlight” that way, then click at the extreme left and hold down the mouse button and move the mouse to the other end to select the whole of the text).
Then press and hold down the “Ctrl” key and type the character “C” to copy that text to your “Clipboard”. Then start a new reply to this thread.
Type something like, “Here is the URL where I found the image:”, and type the “Enter” key.
Then press and hold down the “Ctrl” key and type the character “V” to paste the content of the “Clipboard” into the reply.
Then type the “Enter” key and any closing message you wish.
Here is the picture! I’m not sure I did what you said, Semper, but I done did it! Thanks!
The DL&W did run a photographer/publicity train ca 1910 with the company photographer and Miss Phoebe Snow. Most of the shots I’ve seen from that shoot were taken at Denville on what we called Track 2 or the station track on the Boonton Line. There is even a postcard from this shoot taken from across the parking lot with Miss Phoebe perched on the cow catcher! Of course, this was a marketing/advertising program promoting clean antracite coal which was burned in Lackawanna steam engines assuring “Phoebe’s gown stays white from day to night, riding the Road of Anthracite!” The Depression caused the raliroad to use whatever coal it could get and was cheaper, and so they returned to bituminious (they never really gave it up, just didn’ t use it on crack passenger trains) which burned black and sooty into the 50’s (ahhh, I remember the smell and the darkness that hung over the yard and neighborhood with the passage of each train…incidently, the neighborhood being right behind and to the left in the picture posted).
So we see the DL&W and CN&W both used female forms nuzzled up to the engineer to assure the traveling ladies that train travel could be both safe and clean. DId any other railfoads…and the Harvey Girls don’t count…use the same concept with woman in cabs and otherwise riding the rails so securly?
