Like the lunch menus of the 1960s, breakfast menus on the California Zephyr were printed on cards. Here is a blank card featuring the Zephyr logo. No doubt the commissaries printed thousands of these blanks, and later printed the menus … Continue reading
Four years after yesterday’s menu and choices have been reduced a bit further. There are only two sandwich platters with dessert and beverage, instead of five, and there are no fish entrées on the a la carte menu. However, an … Continue reading
Yesterday’s California Zephyr lunch menu was a folder, but by the early 1960s lunch menus were merely a single card. The table d’hôte side had been replaced by “combinations” that consisted of a beverage, dessert, and one of five sandwiches, … Continue reading
Here’s a California Zephyr lunch menu dated March, 1951, when the train was just two years old. The cover shows the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, but the menu inside looks nothing like what I would expect from a fine, Bay … Continue reading
We’re going back in time, as today’s dinner menu is from January, 1955, as opposed to yesterday’s March, 1957 menu. The two use similar type faces and are about the same size, but are laid out differently: the 1955 one … Continue reading
Here’s a Cal Zephyr menu dated March, 1957. I previously presented a menu dated April, 1957, and despite the small separation in time the two are very different. Both are about the same size and same layout, but the paper … Continue reading
If yesterday’s criticism of Leslie Ragan seemed harsh, it was because of my familiarity with posters by Bern Hill, an underrated artist who did 65 paintings for General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division. These paintings were all used as front-cover advertisements in … Continue reading
Click image to download a PDF of the letterhead. Passengers in the observation cars of the California Zephyr could use this on-board stationery to write friends about their journey. The letter and envelope was the same size as stationery for … Continue reading
As a part of their advertising, the railroads operating the California Zephyr made tens if not hundreds of thousands of postcards. I have at least ten different postcards, some of which I’ve already shown, but I’m showing them again here … Continue reading
In addition to the General Motors ad that appeared in the July, 1949 issue of National Geographic, several other companies placed CZ-related ads in Nat Geo or other magazines. One of them, naturally, was the Budd Company, which built the … Continue reading
