The coffee shop car was something new on Great Northern’s 1947 Empire Builder. Great Northern’s heavyweight Empire Builder and Oriental Limited had a lounge car open only to Pullman passengers and a diner that was mainly patronized by sleeping car passengers. Some pre-war streamliners such as the City of Los Angeles included a cafe car for coach passengers, and Great Northern followed suit in the nation’s first post-war overnight streamliner.
Click image to download a 340-KB PDF of this menu.
Still, the coffee shop was small, occupying only about 40 percent of the car, while the rest was used for a crew dorm. This allowed room for 10 seats at a lunch counter and ten more seats in a lounge. Thus, the menu shown here is pretty simple, offering 13 sandwiches, a few salads, and plate meals with “meat or fish” for $1.10 (about $11.50 today). Note that the menu is decorated in Hudson Bay blanket stripes, which were also used to decorate the lunch counter.
The car must have proven far more popular than Great Northern expected. When it ordered a brand new Empire Builder for 1951, the coffee shop occupied an entire car, with fourteen seats at a lunch counter, four dining tables with twelve seats, and an eighteen-seat lounge — a total of 44 seats. The Ranch menu used in this car offered all of the same things as the coffee shop car but with three additional meals, including a hot beef sandwich, chicken fricasse, and veal cutlets. Meanwhile, the coffee shop menu on the Western Star was pretty similar to the one shown above.