We’ve seen this cover before on a café car dinner menu. This one is a breakfast menu. As with all menus in the Moderne series, the images and back cover text are identical to those on an earlier Art Nouveau series menu.

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

The color picture of Old Faithful is based on a black-and-white photo taken by Frank Haynes in around 1910. It is a little surprising that UP didn’t update this with a natural color photo, as it had done for scenes of Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks on the Art Nouveau and Moderne menu series. The print date on my Art Nouveau menu is June 1934, so UP would have had plenty of time to take newer photos.

The print date on today’s menu is September 1935. As it turns out, all of the Moderne menus have that same print date. I suspect that Union Pacific switched menu formats to honor its first streamlined train, the M-10000, which was introduced to the public in February 1934 but not put into regular service (as the City of Salina) until January 1935.

By September, UP had also placed the City of Portland (M-10001) into service and was planning to introduce the City of Los Angeles, City of Denver, and City of San Francisco in 1936. For these trains, however, UP introduced its Winged Streamliner menu series, so the Moderne menus were not used beyond 1936.