Mission San Xavier Menu

Southern Pacific was reputed to have excellent dining car service before passenger ridership nosedived after World War II, but you wouldn’t know it from menus such as this one. Printed on flimsy paper, it’s really just an 8-1/2″x11″ sheet folded in half.

Click image to download a 0.4-MB PDF of this menu.

This particular menu was used on a Knights of Columbus 1941 tour of Mexico (probably just the parts served by Southern Pacific’s Mexican subsidiaries). The unpriced menu offers corned beef hash, ham or bacon with one egg, griddle cakes and bacon, or eggs (probably two), each of which came with fruit or juice, bread, and beverage.

Six different menus of this style are featured on the Southern Pacific menus page, including ones showing the Arizona desert, California redwoods, Hotel Playa de Cortes, Lake Tahoe, New Orleans, and San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park. Others in the series include Carlsbad Caverns, the Columbia River Gorge, a Lake Tahoe beach, and Mount Shasta. All of the appear to date from around 1940 to 1950.


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