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Burlington 33rd Division 1938 Breakfast Menu

Posted on June 16, 2023 by Train LoverJune 16, 2023

The 33rd Division was the 33rd Infantry Division, formed from the Illinois National Guard in 1917 for service in the Great War. Members of the division received nine Medals of Honor during the war. “Black and gold” refers to the division’s logo, a gold cross on a black circle.

Click image to download a 994-KB PDF of this menu.

The menu says it was used while “Traveling via the Burlington Route enroute to the National Legion Convention, Los Angeles, September 1938.” By “national legion” the menu means national convention of the American Legion, which held its 20th annual convention in Los Angeles on September 19 through 22. Continue reading →

Tonight’s Dinner Special

Posted on June 15, 2023 by Train LoverMay 14, 2023

This came with yesterday’s menu, but yesterday’s was a breakfast menu and this is for dinner, so they were probably collected on the same trip. The paper clip mark at the top of this menu shows that it was once inserted into a menu folder, but that folder has gotten separated.

Click image to download a 3.0-MB PDF of this menu.

The menu is for a “special” table d’hôte dinner with juice, salad, or soup, one of four entrées, potatoes or vegetable, bread, dessert, and beverage. This is clearly a bargain menu as first-class menus usually have both potatoes and a vegetable and both soup and salad. The price was 85¢, which if this is from the same year as yesterday’s breakfast menu is about $15 in today’s money.

Crystal River Breakfast Menu

Posted on June 14, 2023 by Train LoverMay 11, 2023

After the Union Pacific’s post-war color photo menus, the largest series of dining car menus on a U.S. railroad was probably the Rio Grande’s glue-on photo menus, of which I’ve so far found 35. Since the Rio Grande menus are dated in the 1940s, I wonder if they were inspired by Rio Grande’s partner in transcontinental passenger traffic, the Burlington.

Click image to download a 569-KB PDF of this menu.

We’ve previously seen a few Burlington menus with photos or illustrations glued onto the covers, including one with a scene in Glacier National Park and one with a scene in Rocky Mountain National Park. Both of them were breakfast menus dated 1936. Continue reading →

Burlington July 1930 Timetable

Posted on June 13, 2023 by Train LoverMay 16, 2023

Although the Dotsero Cutoff had yet to be built, the first schedule in this timetable showed how to take the Burlington to California via the Rio Grande and Western Pacific. The map accompanying the schedule shows Denver-Pueblo-Salt Lake City in a perfectly straight east-west line even though Pueblo was in fact 120 miles due south of Denver, most of which would be saved when the Dotsero Cutoff opened in a few years.

Click image to download a 24.3-MB PDF of this timetable.

The next pages show routes from Chicago and St. Louis to the Pacific Northwest via Burlington, Northern Pacific, and Great Northern. About a year before this timetable was made, Northern Pacific jumped on the all-Pullman bandwagon by taking coaches and tourist sleepers off the North Coast Limited, timing the coach-and-Pullman Pacific Express to leave Chicago at the same time as the North Coast Limited and adding the Alaskan so there would be two daily coach trains. With the Yellowstone Comet (which only went as far west as Yellowstone), NP had four daily trains heading west at least as far as Montana while Great Northern still had only two, the Empire Builder and Oriental Limited. Continue reading →

Big Horn Dude Ranches in 1929

Posted on June 12, 2023 by Train LoverJanuary 9, 2024

This booklet describes 30 dude ranches in the Big Horn Mountains in 1929. A map in the back unfolds to show the region and the location of each of the ranches.

Click image to download a 16.6-MB PDF of this 60-page booklet.

I’m always curious to see what ranches are still operating today. I didn’t check all 30, but most of the ones I did check are gone. A few might still be operating as ranches, but no longer as dude ranches. Some may be subdivided. Continue reading →

Construction Era of the Northern Pacific

Posted on June 11, 2023 by Train LoverJune 20, 2023

Issued 18 years after yesterday’s brochure, this one covers the same ground but does so in a much more visual fashion. We’ve seen the front cover before on a 1963 menu commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Northern Pacific’s last spike ceremony (with ex-President Grant holding the hammer in the painting).

Click image to download a 2.4-MB PDF of this brochure.

The cover illustration is based on a painting by Amédée Joullin (1862-1917) that hangs in the Montana state capitol combined with a photograph of the celebratory train that was taken in St. Paul just before it left for Montana, where the last rails would be laid. Joullin was a French artist who spent many years in the United States painting native Americans and western landscapes. Joullin wasn’t at the last spike ceremony; instead, the 1903 painting was commissioned by NP as a donation to the state of Montana. To place the locomotive in the cover picture, the illustrator reoriented the tracks from Joullin’s straight-on view to a three-quarter view. Continue reading →

Brief History of the Northern Pacific

Posted on June 10, 2023 by Train LoverMay 16, 2023

“The history of the Northern Pacific teems with romance, courage and industry,” claims this hand-typed brochure that, for some reason, NP chose to print on some rather ugly green paper. It might be a little reminiscent of the greens used in the Pine Tree of NP’s original streamlined North Coast Limited, except this was published in 1946, almost two years before that train made its inaugural run.

Click image to download a 3.2-MB PDF of this brochure.

The history extends from 1864, when President Lincoln signed the bill offering the land grant for the railroad, to 1908, when half-subsidiary Spokane, Portland & Seattle completed a line that would carry NP trains from Pasco to Portland. In between it focuses on the dates that the railroad completed construction to various points. Continue reading →

NP Alaska Cruise Brochure

Posted on June 9, 2023 by Train LoverMay 7, 2023

The cover of this four-page brochure features a painting by Sydney Laurence (1865-1940), whose art Northern Pacific also used on posters. This painting of a place called Castle Cape is colored quite a bit differently from an image shown on Flickr, yet they are otherwise nearly identical. It seems likely that these are two different paintings that Laurence made of the same subject but with different coloring.

Click image to download a 1.9-MB PDF of this brochure.

According to Wikipedia, Laurence “more than any other artist, defined for Alaskans and others the image of Alaska as “The Last Frontier.” Born in Brooklyn, Laurence studied at the Art Students League of New York and married another artist, Alexandrina Fredricka Dupre, in 1889. Unable to make a name for himself as an artist, he left his wife and two sons in 1904 to search for gold in Alaska. No one is sure whether he intended to return or just abandoned his family, but they never saw him again. Continue reading →

Here You Are, Eastbound in 1949

Posted on June 8, 2023 by Train LoverMay 8, 2023

We’ve previously seen east- and westbound versions of this guide from 1950 and a westbound one from 1949. Today’s is an eastbound one from 1949. The text of the 1949 and 1950 editions are similar but Great Northern’s conception of its trademark goat changed dramatically.

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

These were probably slipped under the doors of sleeping car passengers early in the morning of their second day out. Although the streamlined Empire Builder entered service in 1947, I’ve only seen these from 1949 and 1950. If those were the only years they were issued, then we now have a complete set.

American Good Will Association Booklet

Posted on June 7, 2023 by Train LoverMay 6, 2023

Ostensibly published by the Franco-American Branch of the American Good Will Association, this booklet promotes the 1926 Columbia River Historical Expedition. The booklet claims the trip was “being organized under the leadership of” the governors of Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.

Click image to download a 6.8-MB PDF of this 36-page booklet.

In fact, the trip was organized by the Great Northern Railway under the leadership of Ralph Budd. Budd modestly kept his name out of this and most other expedition materials and this booklet mentions the Great Northern only twice (plus a logo on the back cover). Budd clearly wanted to spread “ownership” of the expedition to as many people as possible to gain their participation and support. Continue reading →