Since posting about both the see-through Pontiac and the bubbletopped Plymouth show cars that appeared at the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, we thought we'd go hunting for more photos of those cars over at the New York Public Library's digital photo gallery. Alas, no dice, but we did run across plenty of other interesting automobile-related World's Fair images there, including a small set of renderings for an exhibit on the future of transportation at the fair's Transportation Building. Any schmuck can envision the future of transportation - and indeed many have over the last century - but what makes these compelling is that at least some of them are attributed to Raymond Loewy.

The rear-engine streamliner pictured above is almost expected from any late 1930s designer, though it appears to be simply a mixture of Jaray and Bel Geddes design cues. Things start to get a little less typical with the three-wheeled taxicab, the double-decker transcontinental bus and the streamlined road train tractor-trailer. A quick scan of the patents assigned to Loewy shows that he was already thinking along such streamlined lines with his 1937 railcar design for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and that he revisited the idea of a double-decker transcontinental bus in his 1948 motor coach design for Greyhound.

Allegedly, a series of scale models based on these New York World's Fair designs were made for the exhibit, though we've yet to come across any evidence of them.

See More Pictures at Hemmings Motor News