For most of its history of passenger service, the longest ride anyone could take on the Southern Pacific was the Sunset Limited, so the railroad considered this its number 1 train even though it probably didn’t attract as many riders as, say, the Coast Daylights. This is one of a series of classy menus used exclusively on that train in the late 1950s and early 1960s, of which we’ve already seen one that shows a cartoon cowboy on the cover.
Click image to download a 1.3-MB PDF of this menu.
The dining car on the streamlined Sunset was called the Audubon Room, after both John James Audubon and Audubon Park in New Orleans, and featured reproductions of his paintings on the walls. This particular menu cover shows a cartoon of Audubon painting a crane of some kind, while the back cover presents a short bio of Audubon. The other menus in the series don’t show Audubon or birds on the front cover but still have the same bio on the back.
Breakfast in 1964 was a little different from 1939; gone are the lamb chops, breakfast steaks, and fish; in their place are a lot of egg dishes with ham, bacon, or sausage. Corned beef hash is still on the a la carte menu. Keeping up with inflation, menu prices have doubled; multiply prices by 8 to get today’s dollars.