Museum of Science & Industry Dinner Menu

This cover painting is unusual for Santa Fe menus in depicting a scene in Chicago instead of Arizona or New Mexico. The painting is by Frederic Mizen, who did many paintings for Santa Fe including Albuquerque station and Taos Pueblo. The dinner menu, which was used on the Grand Canyon, has a date code of “2-21-3” which I interpret to mean it was issued in 1963.


Click image to download a 1.2-MB PDF of this menu.

The cover painting shows the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, which for many years exhibited a 3,000-square-foot model railroad called the Museum & Santa Fe. This layout was built by Milton Cronkhite, who was considered one of the finest model railroaders in America before World War II. Cronkhite also did the model railroad shown at the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition, and Santa Fe was so impressed that it paid him $58,000 (about a million dollars in today’s money) to do the one for the Chicago museum. Cronkhite’s O-scale railroad in the museum was recently replaced by a 3,500-square-foot HO gauge layout built by BNSF at a cost of $3.5 million. That’s a lot of money but these layouts earned Santa Fe and, later, BNSF enormous publicity and goodwill.


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