Multnomah Falls 1954 Breakfast Menu

We’ve already seen this photograph on the cover of a 1958 menu marked “Domeliner City of Portland.” This one is from 1954, before domes were added to the train, so it is marked “Streamliner City of Portland.” It is also one of those unusual menus in which the photo doesn’t wrap around do the back cover.


Click image to download a 1.5-MB PDF of this menu.

The other non-wrap-around menus we’ve seen show the Columbia River Gorge, Mt. Hood, and Fisherman’s Wharf. We’ll see a couple more in the next few days. The dates of these menus range from 1954 to 1961, when lots of other menus were issued in the wrap-around style. While Multnomah Falls definitely photographs better in portrait mode than landscape view, most of the images would look better in landscape mode and at least two of the other menus are crops of landscape photos used on other menus in the wrap-around style.

The menu itself is completely typical of a mid-50s Union Pacific breakfast menu, with a long list of a la carte items on the left and ten different breakfast meals on the right. So how and why UP decided to use this and other photos in a non-wrap-around format is a mystery.


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