A track record of high-tech vision
In his drive to make trains chic, Cesar Vergara follows an an elite cadre of stylists. He speaks of the influences of Otto Kuhler and Brooks Stevens, who transformed trains that resembled sooty collections of plumbing into multi-hued arrows, replete with torpedo noses, glass skytop roofs and beaver tails. The most influential proponents of styling trains were Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss. Their objective in the 1930s was the same as Vergara’s today: Take a stale product and give it a wrapper so snazzy it can’t be ignored. Pennsylvania Railroad hired the flamboyant Loewy to unleash his Parisian flair on everything from station garbage cans to the New York-Chicago passenger train known as the Broadway Limited. Running in parallel, Dreyfuss applied his cool elegance to rival New York Central’s flagship trains. Head to head competition reached its zenith in 1938, when Dreyfuss completely redesigned the Central’s New York-Chicago 20th Century Limited.It wore an icy coat of two-tone grey, from its bulletnosed engine to the fluorescent tail sign that carried its name on its tapered observation car. Inside, muted colours, recessed lighting and flourishes of gunmetal and leather gave it the look of a tony Manhattan business club. Loewy’s Broadway — launched the same day as the Century — was a clean-lined streak of red and gold that started with the bulbous bow of its locomotive and ended on the graceful stern of an observation car. Exterior panache was matched inside with a warm concoction of white, orange and lemon, topped with black accents. From Canadian Pacific to Union Pacific, every road wanted the equivalent of Loewy’s ‘‘Fleet of Modernism’’ and Dreyfuss’ ‘‘Great Steel Fleet.’’ The railway look went from industrial Gothic to Art Deco. But not just on the rails. Other industries rode the wake of the streamliners, often employing Loewy and Dreyfuss to blaze new market-boosting trails. Loewy designed Frigidaire appliances, Studebaker automobiles, airliner interiors, and he re-worked the CocaCola bottle. Dreyfuss made his mark with the circular Honeywell thermostat, generations of Bell telephones, and hotel and steamship interiors. Railway clients departed Loewy and Dreyfuss in the 1950s, but by that time both were booming with business from industries that had learned well the profit-making lesson of styling first taught by the railways. Dreyfuss died in 1972, but his Manhattan design firm lives on; Vergara worked there on John Deere tractors in the late ‘80s. Loewy died in 1986 and considered trains a highlight of his seven-decade career, during which time Life magazine described his studio opening as “one of the 100 events that shaped America most.” —Greg Gormick