LESLIE RAGAN (1897-1972) RAILROADS ON PARADE / NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR. 1939. 40 1/2x27 inches, 103x68 1/2 cm. Condition B+: repaired tears, creases, restored losses and overpainting in margins, some affecting image; minor creases and abrasions in image; pin holes in corners. Among the exceptional exhibits at the 1939 New York World's Fair was the Court of Railways, "a sixteen-acre display of locomotives, trains, and the men who made them run. Twenty-seven principal railroads east of the Mississippi participated, and there were three and a half miles of track . . . in the yards stood the British-built John Bull locomotive of 1831 alongside a modern 140-foot Pennsylvania streamlined giant that ran continuously at sixty miles an hour on a roller bed . . . the highlight of the exhibit was Railroads on Parade . . . a pageant about the 'romance of transport' from covered wagon days to the streamlined trains of 1939. . . it aimed to highlight the role transportation played in the opening and development of the vast American continent" (World of Tomorrow p. 101-102).
