Canada’s parliament building in Ottawa was largely destroyed by fire in 1916, and rebuilt with some differences from the original. The cover of this menu from the Chung collection shows both the old (in the larger picture) and the new (in the smaller one) building.
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The lengthy text on the back is almost an exception from the rule on these menus that everything was about the Canadian Pacific. The first four paragraphs don’t even mention the railway. The last one returns to form, however, saying, “Canada’s Parliament Buildings stand to-day as a graceful symbol of that Confederation which was given stability and permanence by the Canadian Pacific Railway.”
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The rest of the Confederation series of menus solely focused on the railway. This one shows the first train to travel from Montreal to Vancouver in 1886. The smaller picture shows the then-modern Trans-Canada Limited.
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The third menu today shows early and then-modern signal towers that enabled the railway to safely operate trains in multiple directions on multiple tracks. Although positive train control had actually been invented nearly a decade before this menu was issued, railroads considered it too expensive and so the menu focuses on automatic block signals as the most modern technology in use on the CP.
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The Spiral Tunnels were nearly two decades old when this menu was issued, but they are heralded as the pinnacle of engineering achievements. Given the tools of the day, they were quite an achievement, but CP also had to deal with the fact that its competitor, Canadian National, had a much lower and easier pass to cross over the Rocky Mountains.
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Finally, CP dedicated one of its confederation series of menus to the newest of its hotels, the Saskatchewan in Regina. It was also one of the more boring, at least architecturally, as the railroad had given up on the chateau style that characterized its older hotels in favor of a more modern, blocky style. All of these confederation menus were used on Canadian Pacific dining cars.