The back cover of this menu describes the lands between Salt Lake City and the Sierra Nevada as “the Western Garden of Allah.” Whether this was inspired by the Rock Island Railroad’s Garden of Allah book, or the 1936 movie starring Marlene Dietrick and Charles Boyer, I suspect that even people living in Arabia wouldn’t consider this desolate area to be much of a paradise.
Click on image to download a 1.2-MB PDF of this menu.
Inside, the menu offers sirloin steak, lamb chops, and ham, along with the usual eggs, wheat cakes, and cereals for breakfast. The opposite side of the menu offers a variety of non-alcoholic beverages, many of which were supposed to be hangover cures. Someone has helpfully handwritten “April 13, ’38” on the interior, and presumably that is the date the menu was used on a Western Pacific train.