THE PRESENT TIME

Woven on silk:-
 

Printed at bottom of card-mount:-
WOVEN IN SILK BY THOMAS STEVENS, INVENTOR AND MANUFACTURER, COVENTRY AND LONDON, (REGISTERED)

The Present Time.
60 MILES AN HOUR.

Card-mount:
14.0cm deep by 20.3cm wide

silk:
5.1cm high by 15.2cm wide

by Austin Sprake:
The two-carriage version. The front of the engine, the funnel and side of coal-car are in black. The two carriages are coloured red, blue, green, black and yellow.

by Geoffrey Godden:
This title embraces several landscape views of trains. The first version was originally issued in 1879, at the York Exhibition, under the title STEPHENSON'S "TRIUMPH" [see st560 on this site]; but by mid-August 1879 the same view of the LORD HOWE engine with two coaches was issued under the new title THE PRESENT TIME. This title appears on printed back-labels from 4 onwards, but later, different railway engines are depicted above the same printed title. The early examples will be found on type B card-mounts [as above] - sometimes type B1, with the diamond-shaped registration mark impressed in the top right-hand corner. Most card-mounts have the sub-title "60 miles an hour" printed below the main title, but sometimes this extra wording is omitted.
Several variations in colour are also recorded. There is one example with a brown funnel and coal-car instead of the normal black. Another version has no red silk in the coaches, which are mainly in green and blue, while a later variation has black, blue, green, red and yellow silk making up the coaches.

Other comments:
Godden, above, mentions a colour variation, with brown funnel and coal-car. Below is an image of this colour variation:

same silk picture, but with brown silk funnel instead of black

Below is an image of the same picture, but with white engine, coal-car and carriage ends:

same silk picture, but with white silk instead of the usual green