As I’ve noted before, in 1961 Canadian National changed its colors from drab black and green (with yellow locomotive noses) to even drabber black and dirty white (with red locomotive noses). This was at the same time that it updated … Continue reading
This menu card is in English on one side and French on the other. The menu is surprisingly sparse; about what you’d expect from Amtrak today, not a railroad in the mid-1960s. When Union Pacific started using cards instead of … Continue reading
Once a thriving sawmill town whose population peaked at 4,000 in the 1950s, Ocean Falls is accessible only by boat or seaplane. The sawmill that supported the town closed in 1980 and today it is nearly a ghost town with … Continue reading
Dated three days after yesterday’s menu, the photo on the cover of this one is even drabber, mainly because of Southeast Alaska’a typically cloudy skies. While the photograph may be more honest than the paintings CN used in the 1950s, … Continue reading
By 1963, Canadian National Steamships had replaced the brightly colored paintings on the covers of its 1950s menus with somewhat drab photographs. Southeast Alaska is an amazing place, but this photo makes it seem just a little washed out. Perhaps … Continue reading
Canadian National’s 1956 timetable lists at least eleven trains in the Montreal-Toronto corridor as pool trains, meaning they shared some costs with and accepted tickets issued by the Canadian Pacific. Confusingly, for passengers, not all trains in the corridor were … Continue reading
Although Cape Breton is an island, it is less than a mile from the mainland and connected with it by a rock-filled causeway. In Cape Breton, says the back of this menu, “most of the voices are Scotch, many of … Continue reading
Someone collected this menu as a souvenir of a ride on a CN train from Cornwall, Ontario to Detroit on August 13, 1954. From the notes, it appears they ordered fruit juice, French onion soup, a sirloin steak (which is … Continue reading
The cover of this menu is meant to illustrate how narrow the channel is for some portions of the Inside Passage. The illustration makes it appear that the channel is about twice as wide as the Prince George was long, … Continue reading
This menu shows the closest view yet of the Prince George, as well as what I suspect is a highly stylized view of a glacier draining into the Inside Passage. The Prince George passed at least four glaciers on its … Continue reading
