Transportation Covers

Rachel Cole, curator of the Northwestern University Transportation Library, posted what I think may be the longest image thread I've ever seen on BlueSky.

It includes dozens of covers from the library's collection of transportation studies, which means it's a glimpse of both 20th century graphic design styles and what the world of transportation professionals thought was worth studying or documenting for posterity.

Here are a just few of the ones I thought were most notable for my idiosyncratic reasons. Aside from looking through the ones she posted, Cole also said the whole collection can be searched here. 

 The oldest one I saved was also the plainest. I assume it's from 1951 since Triborough was founded in 1946 by the infamous Robert Moses:

I thought this cover illustration about the introduction of containerization was visually excellent in its graphic strength and sly meaning… and also it informed me about when that revolution in shipping occurred:

Based solely on the illustration style, I would place this cover around 1970, and I would really like to read the contents of this report:

This piece is also probably from the early to mid-1970s. These days the use of a rainbow would get it banned from distribution in too many U.S. institutions:

A 1976 publication from the energy crisis. Too bad it didn't have an effect:

Not a great design, but another report I'd like to read. That's a bus stamped into a pill in the center, and the hard to read headline near the bottom of the cover reads "Take twice daily relieves congestion, headache and gas pain."