The North Star was the name of a Paris-to-Amsterdam express train run by the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits. “Of all of Cassandre’s posters, [this] may be his most audacious. He has dispensed with the railway imagery that one had always encountered in every previous railway poster: coaches, locomotives, passengers, baggage, conductors, and so forth. Leaving only the rails, Cassandre solves the problem of having to advertise a daytime service that uses a nocturnal image (the North Star) as its name. He achieves his solution by using the somewhat surreal device of turning a night sky into the ground of the poster and having the star hover above it. In what could have been a static arrangement, the rails are laid out so that they imply forward movement. This is done by splitting one rail off from another and having it rejoin another to its left. Even though such an arrangement is mechanically false (as is just about the entire way all of the rails are juxtaposed), it is precisely because of it that the poster attains a dynamic realism more compelling than ‘reality itself’ (Brown & Reinhold, p. 13).