If Old Faithful is the star of Yellowstone National Park, Old Faithful Inn is the star of the park’s infrastructure. Built with funds from the Northern Pacific in 1905, the inn remains an important landmark today. So it is nice to see it on the front of this “real photo” Northern Pacific menu, whose scans were contributed by Streamliner Memories reader Douglas Swanson.

Click image to download a 931-KB PDF of this menu.

Like other menus in this series, this one is undated, but it lists “L.K. Owen” as the superintendent of dining cars. He ascended to that position in 1921, so the menu is from sometime in the 1920s.

Southern Pacific had a series of menus printed on flimsy paper with black-and-white photos that folded like a brochure. Some of them were used on trains while others were marked as “sample menus” to entice passengers to go to the dining car.

Similarly, two of the Northern Pacific real-photo menus are clearly ads for the dining cars, not actual menus used in the dining cars. The rest are simply a listing of a la carte items for an unspecified meal. One of them is stamped with the name and address of Northern Pacific’s passenger agent in Chicago.

Could it be that all of these are samples used to get people into the dining cars? It is hard to tell as I don’t have any other Northern Pacific menus from the 1920s for comparison, but I’m beginning to think it’s true.