This 1928 dining car menu advertises winter cruises on Canadian Pacific steamships. During the summer, those ships served the Montreal-Liverpool route, but in the winter, when that route was too icy, the ships went elsewhere. We’ve previously seen a menu advertising an around-the-world cruise; this one focuses on a cruise of the Mediterranean. The cover was painted by CP artist Gordon Fraser Gillespie.
Click image to download a 1.0-MB PDF of this menu.
The back cover notes that, in both 1928 and 1929, the Mediterranean cruise would depart New York on February 4 about the Empress of Scotland. That ship was launched as the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria in 1905 by the Hamburg America line, but was taken by the allies after World War I and eventually given to Canadian Pacific. She was scrapped in 1930, so the Mediterranean cruises were among her last voyages.
The back cover also advertises West Indies cruises about the Duchess of Bedford and Montroyal. The former ship was brand-new in 1928 and was one of the few CP ships that survived World War II, after which it was renamed Empress of France. The latter ship was originally commissioned as the Empress of Britain in 1905 and renamed Montroyal in 1924. Like the Empress of Scotland, the Montroyal was scrapped in 1930.
The back cover mentions two more cruises. First, the ’round-the-world cruise left New York on December 28 aboard the Empress of Australia. This was another ship originally built for Hamburg America, as the Tirpitz, and retained by the British after the war as a part of reparations.
Finally, on January 22, 1929, the Empress of France departed New York on a cruise to South America and Africa. That Empress of France was built in 1913 as the Alsatian for the Allan Line, a Scottish company acquired by CP in 1917.
This menu has a printer code reading “3-4 16-7-28-V” which might be interpreted to mean trains 3 & 4 after July 16, 1928. Trains 3 & 4 were the Dominion, CP’s premiere year-round train at the time. The “evening” menu is all a la carte, which means that a table d’hôte menu insert was probably provided by the steward but has since been lost.