The DL&W’s approach to advertising put it on the map.

Passenger rail turns luxurious with Phoebe Snow.

In the early 1900s, riding a train required some tolerance of the smoke and soot from steam locomotive engines. Steam engines burned soft bituminous coal or wood, and passengers often disembarked with clothes and luggage covered in a veil of soot. The smell lingered. Cinders stung the eyes. Even those riding in first-class cars weren’t immune to such discomfort.

When the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad (DL&W) began promoting its cleaner-burning anthracite coal, it had both a genuine advantage and a challenge. To advertise this fact, the company needed a symbol.

The DL&W’s brand advances

The railroad turned to Ernest Elmo Calkins, a copywriter and early innovator in marketing and storytelling. Working with DL&W’s internal advertising manager Wendell Colton, Calkins created a fictional woman named Phoebe Snow. She was elegant, refined, and always impeccably dressed in white. Her pristine appearance illustrated that anthracite travel was clean, quiet, and refined

Through Phoebe’s voice, the DL&W’s advertising tone turned toward accessibility, rhyme, and femininity. Unlike typical corporate advertising of the time, which leaned on formal language and scenic illustrations, the DL&W used Phoebe to speak directly to customers. She wasn’t an engineer or a conductor; she was a passenger, and a believable one.

Snow represented a promise

The campaign worked because it leveraged a genuine differentiator. DL&W locomotives burned a harder, cleaner coal sourced from the railroad’s mines in eastern Pennsylvania. While competitors belched smoke and ash, the DL&W could claim better. Passengers who took the route to Buffalo or Hoboken didn’t arrive covered in soot; they arrived at their destination looking as fresh and clean as they did when their train departed.

Customers could see the proof of the brand’s promise in their personal experience. Phoebe’s white dress was more than a costume; it was a symbol of brand trust.  

Phoebe’s appearances make a splash

To give Phoebe Snow a public face, DL&W hired 23-year-old actress Marian Arnold-Murray to appear as the character at events along the rail line. Dressed in white with a violet corsage, she embodied the railroad’s brand promise.

In 1904, more than 10,000 people gathered in Binghamton, New York, to see Phoebe arrive by train. She disembarked to cheers, posed for photographs, and paraded through the city in an open carriage drawn by white horses. The public saw Phoebe as a real person and a celebrity.

This kind of marketing was rare, and the campaign made Phoebe one of the first fictional characters tied to a live brand representative. Her popularity reached beyond the train platform. She showed up in society columns, fashion pages, and yachting recaps. Speculators suggest the Brandy Alexander, a popular white cocktail, was created in her honor.

Snow enters pop culture history

Phoebe’s image carried the railroad’s message into the public imagination. She wasn’t just a model of comfort—she was a model for modern branding. The campaign brought attention to anthracite and the idea that transportation could be clean, refined, and stylish. It also introduced a new kind of railroad advertising based on story, tone, and voice.

Newspapers described “Phoebe Snow-white” dresses. Magazines borrowed her image for etiquette columns and romantic fiction. Even film took notice; Edwin S. Porter parodied her in his 1903 short A Romance of the Rails.

As the First World War began, anthracite was used for military purposes. Steam engines reverted to dirtier fuels, and Phoebe was quietly retired. She returned briefly in the 1940s, when DL&W named a passenger train in her honor, but rail travel itself was beginning to decline by then.

Still, Phoebe Snow changed the way Americans thought about passenger trains. She gave the DL&W a public personality, grounded in genuine value but elevated by storytelling. The campaign didn’t rely on technical details or dry explanations. It relied on the idea that a woman in white could sell a ticket better than anything else.