The obscure pictures one stumbles into…but this one caught my eye, because although that road may well have been crazy steep (1 in 3, steepest part), there’s no way that this coach could have made it up there at that angle. Well, unless it had a JATO rocket in the back. But the confirmation to my doubt was provided by a comment left at that particular flickr site: The coach is actually an attempt at vintage photoshopping, take a look at it with a magnifier and you will see where the image has been cut out of another photo, the blade mark at the front rhs is quite well defined, the other give-away is that the image of the coach used is actually a mirror image with the sliding passenger door appearing on the wrong side for a British coach ! : )
Update: it’s not just the coach; it’s the whole angle of the shot. I straightened it, and it looks quite a bit different indeed. Now where’s the jackalope?
Pasting in vehicles was common on postcards in the first half of the 20th century. I have a small postcard collection here (mostly related to my old-roads hobby) and lots of them have vehicles obviously pasted in.
Time for a guest post? I would like to see your collection.
You’d think they could have gotten the point across by having someone stand on the steepest part of the road.
Wow it looks like a horse would struggle with that road.
Here’s a link to a picture of the King and Queen of England driving around that bend in the mid-60s.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8833545@N03/3825115383/#DiscussPhoto
Apart from the more accurate view of its steepness, the lack of security guards for the royals is also happily notable.
Reminds me of an attempt to climb Liberty Street Extension in Warren, PA in 1952 on our way to a picnic in my dad’s 49 Kaiser. There was a section at the bottom of the hill that seemed about as steep as your picture. Dad put the car in first gear but it just would not go. As I recall, he then turned around, put it in reverse and up the hill we went.
I have a copy of a postcard from Crater Lake that dates from probably the 1950s. It has a beautiful color photograph of the lake, along with a pasted-in cutout of a baby deer that, even back then, would have been obvious. It’s hilarious!
Now it’s impossible to know what’s “real” and what’s not in a picture. Progress!
Oh, I worked at Kenworth back in the 1990s, and it was common to cut-and-paste different models of trucks into a picture over the original wheels/chassis, for promotional materials. And they did a very good job of it.
That reminds me of the IH Travelall ad campaign from the 70’s where they exaggerated the grade of the road the truck and trailer was climbing by tiling the picture. The problem was that there were trees in the background that now appeared to be growing at an angle. It was a dense patch of evergreens so it wasn’t obvious at a glance but you didn’t have to look that hard either. It was the print companion piece to the first TV ad in this article. https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/my-favorite-international-ads-cornbinders-at-work-and-play/