Here’s a menu featuring the Banff Springs Hotel on the cover that was used on the Mountaineer some time in 1952. The bottom of the inside says “Canadian Pacific – Soo Line,” emphasizing that the Mountaineer went from Minneapolis-St. Paul over the Soo Line to Canada, meeting the Canadian Pacific main line at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
Click image to download a 1.5-MB PDF of this menu.
The Mountaineer operated only from late June to late August. The rest of the year, the train leaving Minneapolis-St. Paul was called the Soo-Dominion, and it was combined with the Toronto section of the Dominion at Moose Jaw. The Dominion itself was actually two trains, numbers 3 & 4 from Toronto and numbers 7 & 8 from Montreal, which operated about an hour apart west of Sudbury.
Canadian Pacific also had a local, unnamed train, trains 1 & 2, that connected both Montreal and Toronto with Vancouver. This meant that, during the summer months, travelers west of Moose Jaw had a choice of four transcontinental trains a day. Three of those trains crossed the Rocky Mountains in daylight, while trains 1 & 2 crossed in daylight only in the eastbound direction, arriving at Banff westbound at about 1:30 am.
I believe this is the only breakfast menu I’ve ever seen with no bacon, ham, or sausage available. You could get two kinds of fish, including “tasty” fish cakes, apparently as opposed to the former choice of not tasty fish cakes. Chicken hash seems to be about as close to meat as you got. I wonder what the deal was? It was long after WWII, and the Korean War didn’t impose any meat rationing that I’m aware of. Were all the meat companies in Canada on strike? This is one real oddball breakfast menu.
Jim