Here is Northern Pacific’s rather pathetic attempt at a “holiday menu” in 1967. We’ve seen this menu cover before. Inside, the menu has no holiday decorations but claims in large letters that it is a “Holiday Menu.” The menu says that it was for “Noon to 9:30 pm.” Does that mean NP didn’t bother to issue a separate lunch menu?
Click image to download a 1.3-MB PDF of this menu.
As I’ve noted before, in many respects the Northern Pacific comes up lacking when compared with its competitors. Great Northern cut the Chicago-Seattle time for its fully streamlined 1947 Empire Builder to 44 hours, and the Milwaukee Road soon matched it. Northern Pacific took years more to fully streamline the North Coast Limited and didn’t get down to a 44-hour schedule until the early 1950s.
Where railroads like Union Pacific and Canadian Pacific began using color photography in their advertisements and on their menu covers in the 1930s, Northern Pacific didn’t discover color photography until the 1960s, and then used it only sparingly — and obviously not on menu covers. This and other photo covers on NP menus were taken not by a professional photography but by an NP employee, Ron Nixon, who happened to be a railfan. I hope they paid him for the use of his photos.
After introducing vista domes, the Traveller’s Rest car, and the Raymond Loewy color scheme, Northern Pacific could once again be proud of the North Coast Limited. But this menu was still missing something. The only concessions to the holidays on the menu itself are a roast turkey dinner and a choice of pumpkin pie, hot mince pie, or bread pudding for dessert.
Dessert, however, wasn’t even included in the price of the table d’hôte meals: it cost an extra 25 cents (about $2 in today’s money). The turkey dinner was about $29 in today’s money while a sirloin steak dinner was $42. Those prices are comparable to table d’hôte meals on other railroads, but the other railroads included dessert.
I wouldn’t be so tough on Northern Pacific. Four color printing back in those days was an expensive process, and it may be that the passenger department thought it better to hold printing costs down in order to keep niceties like fresh flowers on the dining car tables.
Santa Fe’s “Welcome Aboard” brochure for the Super Chief circa late 1960s was printed in blue ink on white card stock, so NP was not the only road at the time that was watching those sort of costs.
Finally, I’m not saying the NP menu is necessarily an example, but high quality B & W photography can be every bit as appealing as color, if done right.