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The Mounted 1949 Dinner Menu

Posted on January 7, 2024 by Train LoverDecember 29, 2023

We’ve seen this photograph before on a 1941 menu in what I call the Bodoni series (with vertical lines framing the photo) as well as on this 1947 menu in what I call the Center Portrait series, which also had Bodoni type but no lines. Today’s menu is from 1949 and is in what I call the Upper Left Color series because most of the menus in the series have blue, yellow, green, magenta, or rose backgrounds. This one is distinguished by having a grey background.

Click image to download a 1.3-MB PDF of this menu.

On most U.S. railroads, the distinctions between one menu series and another are quite obvious. But, as I noted on the Canadian Pacific menu series page, Canadian menu series seemed to evolve rather than leap from one series to another. Even within many of the series I have defined there are differences: for example, only a few of the Center Portrait series also use Bodoni type. In any case, this “Mounted” (the title of the text on the back) is clearly different enough from the other menus that used the same photo that I was glad to fill in this gap in my collection. Continue reading →

Africa-South America Cruise Memograms

Posted on January 6, 2024 by Train LoverDecember 29, 2023

Here are ten “memograms” by Florence DeMuth, the resident artist aboard many of Canadian Pacific’s cruises in the late 1920s and 1930s. The drawings include scenes of Gibraltar, Naples, Venice, Greece, the Nile, Palestine, Zanzibar, South Africa, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro.

Click image to download a 4.9-MB PDF of this group of ten mammograms.

This combination of stops would only have been made on one of CP’s Africa-South America cruises that took place between 1928 and 1936. Though not mentioned in the name, the cruises also visited Mediterranean ports. The person who sold these to me said they were from circa 1935. In that year, the cruise was aboard the Empress of Australia and was advertised as “five cruises in one.” I’m tentatively dating the memograms to that year.

CP Wheat Farm 1931 Dinner Menu

Posted on January 5, 2024 by Train LoverDecember 29, 2023

M. Leone Bracker preferred to draw real people, not models. This suggests somewhere on the Canadian prairie lived a farm family who looked like the people on the cover of this menu. Canadian Pacific must have offered Bracker a pass to visit various parts of the railroad so he could make these drawings.

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

While other menus in the 50th anniversary series represented different parts of Canadian Pacific’s operations — railroad, steamships, and hotels — this one represents the settlement of the West that was made possible by construction of the railway. In addition to the railway, steamships, and hotels, a small blurb on the back of all of these menus noted that Canadian Pacific “employs 225,000 miles of telegraph wire” and also offers traveller’s checks. I suspect Bracker didn’t do a menu cover for traveller’s checks but I won’t be surprised if he did one for the telegraph. Continue reading →

CP Hotels 1931 Lunch Menu

Posted on January 4, 2024 by Train LoverDecember 29, 2023

Just as yesterday’s Angus Shops menu represented Canadian Pacific’s railroad operations, the Empress of Japan menu represented its steamships, so this menu, with Banff Springs Hotel on the cover, represents its hotel operations. Thanks to Canadian Pacific, “from one end of the land to the other,” says the back of the menu, “magnificent hostelries have arisen, which give Canada a new and enviable opportunity to tell her story to those who come and see her beauties and opportunities at first hand.”

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

The Indians and teepees on the cover represent live in western Canada before the arrival of the railroad. “Where only the Indians had hunted on the mountains,” notes the back, “now the great hotels at Banff and Lake Louise arrest the eye.” Although the cover appears to show two different Indians, a close look reveals they are both the same person, but one is somewhat less detailed — perhaps representing the fading of that style of life. Like the other two menus in the 50th Anniversary series, this cover was drawn by M. Leone Bracker. Continue reading →

Angus Shops Lunch Menu

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Train LoverDecember 29, 2023

Several years ago, I posted menus from the Chung collection that featured steamships on the cover. One showed the Empress of Japan along with some sights people might see in Asia, possibly on a Canadian Pacific world cruise. On my Canadian Pacific menu series page, I included this with other menus that featured cruise ships or steamships even though the Empress of Japan menu was actually used in a dining car.

Click image to download a 1.4-MB PDF of this menu.

The fine print on that menu noted that 1931 was the 50th anniversary of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It turns out that the railway did a series of menus celebrating that anniversary. As an economy during the Depression, the menus all featured black-and-white covers. The cover on today’s menu represents Angus Shops where Canadian Pacific built hundreds of steam locomotives as well as many of its freight and passenger cars. Continue reading →

Canadian Pacific Resorts in the Rockies

Posted on January 2, 2024 by Train LoverDecember 29, 2023

This beautiful cover is a blatant example of bait and switch as the inside of this booklet says almost nothing about resorts in the Rockies. The inside front cover lists 13 Canadian Pacific hotels, only three of which were in the Rockies, and 11 bungalow camps, three of which were not in the Rockies, but doesn’t say anything about any of them in particular.

Click image to download an 3.9-MB PDF of this 8-page booklet.

The next four pages are timetables for CP’s transcontinental trains: the Trans-Canada Limited, the Imperial, the Vancouver/Toronto Express, and the Mountaineer. The inside back cover describes Canadian Pacific steamships on the Great Lakes and to Alaska. Only the back cover, which has six black-and-white photographs taken around Banff and Lake Louise, comes close to living up to the promise made by the front cover title. Continue reading →

Legends of the St. Lawrence with Cover

Posted on January 1, 2024 by Train LoverDecember 3, 2023

We saw this colorful booklet with text by Katherine Hale and paintings by Charles Walter Simpson here a couple of years ago. Since I try not to post incomplete items, I was disappointed to realize that the copy I had was missing its cover, something I should have realized from the incomplete map on the back page.

Click image to download an 23.3-MB PDF of this 52-page booklet.

Here is the booklet with its cover, whose front and back paintings are also by Charles Simpson. The inside front cover is blank and the inside back cover has the missing piece of the map. There’s really not much more to say about the booklet that I didn’t say before.

Dieselization of the SP&S

Posted on December 31, 2023 by Train LoverDecember 31, 2023

Several years ago, I presented a painting of an SP&S E-7 locomotive prepared by General Motors design staff. I noted that the locomotive wasn’t actually delivered in those colors; instead, it was painted in the Great Northern Empire Builder colors. I’ve since learned that I was wrong; it didn’t receive the Empire Builder paint job until 1951.

Click image to download a 5.0-MB PDF of this paint diagram. Click here to download a 2.5-MB JPG of this paint diagram.

The above paint diagram, which is dated May 18, 1948, is from General Motors files and I am grateful to Joe Molinari for contributing a copy to Streamliner Memories. While this doesn’t absolutely prove that the locomotive was painted in those colors when it was delivered to the SP&S in 1948, photographic evidence below shows that it was. Continue reading →

The Land of Opportunity Now

Posted on December 30, 2023 by Train LoverDecember 24, 2023

This curiously titled booklet “is the first of a series to be issued jointly by the Burlington, Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railways,” says the introduction, “giving authoritative information about the Pacific Northwest.” We’ve previously seen several others in the series, including Western Gateway to World Trade, Treasure Lands of the Pacific Northwest, Timber Billions of the Pacific Northwest, and–perhaps the most popular one–Through the American Wonderland.

Click image to download a 9.3-MB PDF of this 44-page booklet.

It is always amusing to see what people mean by terms like “Northwest” and “Pacific Northwest.” I usually think of the former as Idaho, Oregon, and Washington while the latter is just Oregon and Washington. But an Oregon State University book, Atlas of the Pacific Northwest, includes Idaho while Minnesota media seem to think that state belongs in the Northwest. Continue reading →

Great Northern June 1951 Timetable

Posted on December 29, 2023 by Train LoverDecember 24, 2023

This timetable introduces two new trains: the Mid-Century Empire Builder, which used completely new equipment, and the Western Star, which was a new name for the equipment from the 1947 streamlined Empire Builder. It is hard to know which was bigger news: that the Great Northern had completely re-equipped its premiere train or that it now had two streamliners each as good as or better than the Milwaukee Road’s Olympian Hiawatha and both better than Northern Pacific’s North Coast Limited.

Click image to download a 28.6-MB PDF of this 44-page timetable.

The back cover ad on this timetable closely resembles one of the panels on a 1953 brochure advertising Two Great Trains. Some passengers might have been puzzled that the back cover ad calls the Empire Builder “new” when it was an old name while it doesn’t apply that word to the Western Star, which was an entirely new name. Continue reading →