This menu advertises Toronto’s Royal York Hotel, the largest in the CP hotel chain and, in fact, the largest in the British Empire at the time. The menu was used in the dining car of CP’s premiere passenger train, the Dominion.

Click image to download a 1.0-MB PDF of this menu.

The menu is undated, but we have two clues. First, the back of the menu lists 17 Canadian Pacific hotels. As I discovered for another menu, the only years in which CP owned 17 hotels were 1931 to about 1935. Continue reading →

The description of trail riding on the back of this menu doesn’t say so, but the mountain on the cover is Mount Assiniboine, which would place these riders in the British Columbia provincial park of that name, which was created in 1922. The photo was taken by the same H. Armstrong Roberts who took the photo of the Lake O’Hara Bungalows on the cover of yesterday’s menu.

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This menu is undated, but it was probably issued at about the same time as yesterday’s, which I dated to 1934. The menu is a la carte, with English on the left and French on the right. This means it was probably used on a train in Quebec or between Quebec and Toronto, as menus used in western Canada were not yet bilingual. The fact that the only printer code is “Que.-5” seems to confirm this. If the 5 referred to train #5, that went from Newport, Vermont to Quebec City, having connected at Newport with a Boston & Maine train that had come via the New Haven from New York City. The train arrived in Quebec after 8 pm, allowing plenty of time for dinner in the dining car.

H. Armstrong Roberts (1883-1947) was an American photographer who started Retrofile, one of the first stock photo companies. Today, his photos are owned by Getty Images. Roberts apparently spent a few days at Lake O’Hara and Getty has posted several of his photos of the Canadian Pacific bungalow camp there. I didn’t find this one in the Getty system but (although the menu doesn’t say so) it is also Lake O’Hara.

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

This is a breakfast menu for an unspecified train. A printer code says “13-14 M.J. 16 – 34.” This menu is probably from the early 1930s, so 34 may indicate the year. I don’t have a 1934 CP timetable, but a 1943 timetable indicates that trains 13 and 14 were the Canadian Pacific numbers for the Soo-Dominion, so it is possible this was used on that train. The 13 & 14 numbers were only used between the U.S.-Canadian and Moose Jaw, in which case “M.J.” may stand for “Moose Jaw.” Continue reading →

This dining car menu is dated July 17, 1934 and was used on the same tour of the Massachusetts-Rhode Island Knights Templar as yesterday’s menu. Breakfast included sliced peaches; cereals with cream; a choice of salmon, lamb chop, ham, eggs, or bacon; potatoes; bread or griddle cakes with maple syrup; and a beverage.

Click image to download a 1.1-MB PDF of this menu.

The cover says the photo of the Empress Hotel was provided by Associated Screen News. Associated Screen was a movie company started by Canadian Pacific in 1920 to help publicize tourism in Canada, so in a sense it was really it was a Canadian Pacific photo. However, it seems to have operated as an independent company, not a subsidiary of CP.

Opening in 1906, Winnipeg’s Royal Alexandra Hotel was one of the first Canadian Pacific hotels to depart from the chateau style that characterized such hotels as the Frontenac and Banff Springs. As a result, although luxurious on the inside, it didn’t look much different from an ordinary office building on the outside, and in fact was somewhat darker than shown in the illustration on the cover of this menu. On the other hand, with just 90,000 residents in 1906, Winnipeg was not a huge metropolis like Montreal or Toronto, so the Royal Alex (as locals called it) was almost certainly the tallest building in the city at the time.

Click image to download a 1.1-MB PDF of this menu.

Guests included such notables as King George VI in 1939 and Princess Elizabeth in 1951, returning as Queen Elizabeth II in 1959. A circa 1930 booklet about the hotel can be viewed or downloaded from the University of British Columbia’s Chung Collection. Continue reading →