Here’s a City of Los Angeles lunch menu featuring the Howard Fogg portrait of a domeliner. Judging from the vegetation in the picture, which looks like Joshua Tree National Monument, the train was probably the City of Los Angeles. Musli … Continue reading
To celebrate the centennial of the joining of the first transcontinental railroad, Union Pacific commissioned sixteen paintings from the then-preeminent railroad painter, Howard Fogg. The paintings ranged historically from the Last Spike ceremony to modern domeliner and freight trains. Click … Continue reading
The inside of this 1958 menu is identical to yesterday’s coffee shop menus, but the cover photo shows a lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. Today, we’ll compare it with a City of Portland dome-dining car menu from the same … Continue reading
Here are two coffee shop dinner menus from the City of Portland. While they have different covers, both are dated August, 1958 and have identical meal offerings. Click to download a 2.1-MB PDF of this menu. A comparison with yesterday’s … Continue reading
Here’s a dinner menu used on the same City of Los Angeles coffee shop car as yesterday’s lunch menu. The cover photo features Las Vegas, which is on the train’s route, while yesterday’s cover was of Mt. Rainier, which is … Continue reading
For most of its life, the City of Los Angeles included both coaches and sleeping cars. For a brief time in the mid-1950s, however, the Union Pacific tried to compete with the Super Chief by making the COLA an all-Pullman … Continue reading
This September 15, 1941 brochure describes the Union Pacific’s “imposing fleet of superb Streamliners” as it stood just before the war. It includes the City of Salinas (M-10000), City of Portland, and two each City of Denver, City of Los … Continue reading
At least one of these three posters is often credited to an artist named W. Haines Hall, but according to Travel by Train they were all a collaborative effort. “Their family resemblance stemmed from the fact that one man, German-born … Continue reading
In 1948, the Union Pacific began a new series of magazine ads that emphasized the trains rather than the destinations. Each ad consisted of a beautifully rendered yellow streamliner and another graphic symbolizing the theme of the ad (“economy,” “charm,” … Continue reading
In 1946, Union Pacific ran a series of ads featuring Willmarth water colors of vacation destinations such as Colorado, Yellowstone, and Zion. Other ads in the series include California, dude ranches, and Western Wonderlands, but the cartoonish drawings in these … Continue reading
