This rather plain menu doesn’t actually have a menu on the inside, but the inside is printed with an elaborate logo and some blue trim. The logo includes the face of a steam locomotive, while the back cover has the “Frisco Faster Freight” logo, which dates the menu cover to before 1952, after which the railroad was fully Dieselized and stopped using the Faster Freight slogan.

Click image to download a 993-KB PDF of this menu.

The back cover also has a map showing Frisco’s lines in nine states. Based on the map, it is a wonder that Frisco had any passenger trains at all, at least in the post-war era, as it didn’t really have any direct lines between any two major cities. It served St. Louis, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Kansas City, Memphis, Birmingham, and Oklahoma City, but most of its routes between the largest cities were not the shortest.

The routes of two of its more famous passenger trains, the Blue Bonnet and Texas Special, are shown on the map, but both of these trains were operated jointly with the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. This provided a connection between St. Louis and San Antonio. Another jointly operated train was the prosaically named Kansas City-Florida Special, which connected Kansas City with Jacksonville via Birmingham, going over the Southern Railway east of Birmingham.

Postwar trains operated exclusively by the Frisco included the St. Louis-Oklahoma City Meteor and the St. Louis-Memphis Sunnyland. This menu, which I date to approximately 1950, could have been used aboard most of these trains, though my 1959 timetable says the Sunnyland did not carry a diner or buffet car.