The Chamber of Commerce Express

The upstairs bathroom in the rented home I'm sharing with my son and his family has wallpaper with a pattern of old advertising posters, several of which I've been able to track down. This is one of them, and, until I got a large version with no overlapping posters, I hadn't seen how many commercial plugs it contains. If you click on it, I think you'll see what I mean.

The Hamilton plant of the Mosler Safe Company, which was headquartered in Cincinnati, can be seen through the window of the dining car, but there are plenty of plugs within the car itself, most of them wildly irrelevant to the theme of travel, unless they are suggesting that people will choose a train not just for the comfortable Pullman cars (a common and sensible thing to promote), but for the fact that it serves Cabinet Whiskey and Peebles Perfectos, both by the Joseph R. Peebles' Sons Company of Cincinnati, though apparently the chap with the Burnside sideburns would prefer to sip an Aurora Export beer from the Crescent Brewing Company of Aurora, Indiana (less than 40 miles from Cincinnati).

And there is more, as you will discover. This 1894 poster is a feast of product-placement, which makes me wonder if the good old Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad paid anything out of pocket to have it printed.

And you thought it all began in 1982 with that trail of Reese's Pieces.