Sunday, July 11, 2010

Postscript: VIA's LRC Debut

VIA Marketing publicized its new LRC trains by producing a bilingual illustrated pamphlet: d'un centre'ville a l'autre LRC from heart to heart. Highlighting stability, practicality, comfort and courteous onboard service, publicity photos of 80's-style VIA passengers were taken for use in the pamphlets. Trackside Treasure has some early copy material that was to be used for captions in the pamphlet. The material was rejected for use, and has not been seen until now, for obvious reasons. Photo 5 (above): "Martin, If I place my compact mirror on the tray, and angle it just so, you'll be able to see a reflection of your outrageous, Muppet-like appearance!"
Photo 6: "This is what my life has come to. Here I am reading a damn newspaper. How long until Al Gore finally discovers the Internet and I can get wi-fi on here?" or "I can't believe there's a guy on here selling Turbo books. Jason somebody. I'll pretend to be reading until after he goes by."
Photo 8: "I sure hope this train is Rapid. When we get in to Montreal, I'll have to hail a cab to get to the Cirque de Soleil dress rehearsal with my performing poodles right away, so I'm applying my makeup on the train to save time."
Photo 1: "Good job, Kyle. Unfortunately, we're about to go through some crossovers to get around a freight up ahead, and all your hard work will collapse like the proverbial house of cards. Personally, I'm holdin' on to this seat for dear life."
Photo 2: "We're only at Belleville? I could sure go for a beer. Maybe if I shake this lady's purse, some change will fall out" or "He's very persistent. I ended up buying two of his Turbo books. I'll stash them here in my carry-on."
Photo 3: "No, seriously Claude. I could've sworn I saw it move just then!" or "Just wait, Marie. When they turn off the banking system, the gravy should cover the meat completely."

4 comments:

Zartok-35 said...

Nice captions! You have a fine sense of humour.

Eric said...

Thanks for your comment, Elijah. Sometimes we take this train biz too seriously, so I thought I'd inject some comic relief. I also have some other VIA promotional material with pretty dated publicity photos, for onboard services such as Dayniters. A future post, perhaps.
Eric

Susan said...

My railfan husband showed me this. It kinda reminds me of the old blog about the 1970s Penney's catalogue http://15minutelunch.blogspot.com/2007/10/strap-in-shut-up-and-hold-on-were-going.html

Eric said...

Hi Susan,

Thanks for your comment and link, and I trust your husband is enjoying Trackside Treasure.

I think that some of the 'models' in those posed VIA photos may have been marooned on another train somewhere since the seventies. Rest assured our Simpsons-Sears and Eaton's catalogues were the same, but they also contained some neat-o, groovy train sets that kids today wouldn't be bothered with, because they weren't on a computer screen - virtual trains, maybe.

Thanks for stopping by,
Eric