This poster, from one of the most successful campaigns in American business history, advertises the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad (the DLW), otherwise known as the Lackawanna Railroad or the Lackawanna Line, incorporated in Pennsylvania in 1851 mainly to transport anthracite coal from the northeast coal region of the state to the coal markets of New York City. It merged with several other railroads and experienced significant expansion until its decline by 1940. The Lackawanna Railroad also ran several passenger trains between towns in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. The Road of Anthracite referred to in this and the other posters promoting the line is intended to emphasize the positive aspects of the coal that fuels its trains, known not only for its energy density but also for its purity and the fact that it is virtually smokeless. It allowed elegant passengers like the gentleman here, praising the service in verse to the line’s fictional ambassador, Phoebe Snow, dressed in white, to travel in the kind of clean and comfortable environment they were used to rather than the dirty and hazardous one that most Americans associated with train travel at this point. They certainly needed convincing given that thousands were killed or injured on American trains between 1902 and 1911. Even if they did arrive in one piece, passengers typically disembarked covered either in the ash of wood-burning steam engines or by the soot from the clouds of smoke emanating from bituminous coal-powered trains. These posters were intended to reassure Americans about the safety and cleanliness of anthracite-powered trains—and to distract from the frequent news of child workers, mine cave-ins, and striking miners emerging from the coal regions.