The CNR/GTR added their own promotional pages to this brochure promoting the upcoming 1939 New York World's Fair. The Fair gave itself the difficult task of predicting and portraying the future and you'll be amused by their models of urban centres with faraway clean, green satellite suburbs and factories - with no low-level urban sprawl between them.
A couple of pages are devoted to 'the railroad industry' and its extensive exhibits at the fair. All the railway materials are in the last few pages.
Being a World's Fair, many European countries had their own exhibits and most of the American states also had exhibit buildings. US industrial giants showed off their inventive and scientific expertise through projections of their exciting new products of the future.
Edward Hungerford (1875-1948) referred to himself as the 'foremost rail fan in America'. This is certainly an early use of the 'railfan' term. His varied career began as a journalist and evolved into his becoming a railroad public relations professional, promoter and author. The link to his Wikipedia page appears below, as does a rough search result for his books at archive.org. For the Fair, he developed the full-scale railroad pageant which you can see via the YouTube links below.
Like the Fair, Hungerford's book on the future of railroads (Pattern for a Railroad for Tomorrow, 1945) has some interesting urban planning ideas ... and it features innovative and/or radical track plans for major US centres. These assume that the 1939 World's Fair had not just presaged the post-war decline of the railroads - precipitated by the public interstate system ... the self-promotional, lobbying and industrial might of the motor vehicle industry ... and the suburban lifestyle of the 1950s.
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The Recent Past and the World's Immediate Future
As this Fair worked to predict an amazing and wonderful future, the horrors of the First World War were just 20 years in the past. The Great Depression had just drawn to a close. Safe between two oceans, most Americans would not be drawn into thinking about, or participating in, the Second World War for another two years after the Fair. Public knowledge of the atomic bomb was 6 years in the future.
One person had predicted his own future before the Fair. The brochure mentions that the music for Hungerford's railroad pageant was specially composed by Kurt Weill (1900-1950). Weill was a German Jew who had seen Hitler come to power and he had fled Germany in 1933.
Weill's ballad of Mack the Knife came from his Threepenny Opera (Die 3-Groschen-Oper) - written in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). Bobby Darin popularized a version of this song in 1959 for those Americans living in post-war abundance - two decades after the New York World's Fair of 1939.
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To experience some of the essence of the 1939 New York World's Fair and its focus on railroads ...
to YouTube
Model railroad exhibit 1939 World's Fair
Newsreel, 1939 New York World's Fair
Compilation of Railroad Exhibits, 1939 New York World's Fair
to Wikipedia
to Internet Archive
