This is the 33rd menu I’ve identified in the series of Rio Grande menus with color photos glued onto the front covers. It is far from the most interesting menu in the series but all new menus are interesting as they help to answer questions about railroad marketing and design.

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

Barley can be grown at altitudes over 7,500 feet, the back of this menu informs us, and nearly 10 percent of all barley in the country is grown in Colorado and Utah. (Today it is closer to 5 percent, with over half being grown in Idaho and Montana.) Barley, of course, is used for brewing beer, and we can’t help but wonder how much of the barley shown in the photo made its way to the Coors brewery in Golden, Colorado.

Other than beer, very little barley grown in the country is used for human food, most going for animal feed instead. As the menu says, barley “arrives on the market for human consumption in the form of prime meat.”

This particular menu was printed for a Masons tour to Alaska in 1948. The tour left Denver on June 30 and arrived in Salt Lake on July 1, so this breakfast menu must have been used on that morning. The menu offered cereals, corned beef hash, an omelette, or ham or bacon and eggs.