The Post Card is a Impressive as the Train it Promotes

The train depicted on the front of this post card is the 20th Century Limited Express. The 20th Century Limited was an express passenger train on the New York Central Railroad (NYC) from 1902 to 1967.

The train traveled between Grand Central Terminal in New York City and LaSalle Street Station in Chicago, Illinois, along the railroad's "Water Level Route". NYC inaugurated the 20th Century Limited as competition to the Pennsylvania Railroad, aimed at upper-class and business travellers. It made few station stops along the way and used track pans to take water at speed. In 1938, streamlined train sets designed by Henry Dreyfuss were added to the route. The 20th Century Limited was the flagship train of the New York Central and was advertised as "The Most Famous Train in the World". It was described in The New York Times as having been "[...] known to railroad buffs for 65 years as the world's greatest train", and its style was described as "spectacularly understated". The phrase "red-carpet treatment" is derived from passengers' walking to the train on a specially designed crimson carpet. The amazing part of this post card is that it is as fancy as the train that it is showing off! First, the picture of the train itself is embossed on the card. When I run my fingers over the card I can feel the 3-D effect of the embossing. The dark spots (on the front tracks, on the front and sides of the train, and in the smoke) are actually little pieces of glitter that has been glued onto the card. The title of the card and publisher are also embossed into the card. This card is over 107 years old and the glitter is still there as strongly pronounced as ever!!

I do not usually publish a very large picture of the back of the post card, but I am making an exception this time. Look at the picture of the train; that is the result of the embossing process. This post card is from the pre-March 1, 1907 era. One is only allowed to write the address on the back of the post card. The information about the publisher of this post card comes from: Metropolitan Postcard Club of New York City http://www.metropostcard.com/publishersi.html This major publisher produced a wide variety of color halftone lithographic cards in series that were printed by Emil Pinkau in Leipzig, Saxony. Each city or location of their color card sets were assigned the same number prefix. They also published an unnumbered series of chromolithographic fine art cards that were printed in Dresden. Many of their early cards do not have their name on them, only their distinct eagle logo. Their best known cards are from a very large set that captured scenes throughout the City of New York. These cards tended to use brighter than average colors and were titled in a very distinct font. Similar cards, but with more subdued writing, appeared afterwards depicting scenes from the surrounding regions such as Long Island. Illustrated Post Card Company of 118 Chambers Street in New York was printing millions of cards at a time when picture postcards were at the peak of their popularity. Another address given for them is 520 West 84th Street, New York and they operated from 1905 to 1914. They published a wide variety of color halftone lithographic cards in series that were printed by Emil Pinkau in Leipzig, Saxony. Each city or location of their color card sets were assigned the same number prefix.Their best known cards are from a very large set that captured scenes throughout the City of New York. These cards tended to use brighter than average colors and were titled in a very distinct font. Similar cards, but with more subdued writing, appeared afterwards depicting scenes from the surrounding regions such as Long Island. In 1909 they stopped importing cards from Germany and began printing their own. A large number of black & white cards were produced in a more open halftone with some being poorly hand colored. These black & white cards were numbered consecutively.