Yesterday’s Colorado Room beverage menu had wild rose and lupin on the cover. Today’s has buttercup, anemone, and fringed gentian, the same as this dinner menu.

Click image to download a 230-KB PDF of this menu.

This particular menu, however, wasn’t used on the Denver Zephyr. Instead, it was used for the first annual meeting of the Railroadiana Collectors Association in 1988. Speakers for the meeting including Jackson Thode, a retired Rio Grande official, and my late friend David Schumacher, who helped Tom Rader find cars for restoration and reconstruction when he operated Rader Railcar (later Colorado Railcar). The meeting was coordinated by Richard Luckin, who has written several books on dining car china patterns.

While there is a remote chance that this menu was printed especially for this meeting, I suspect that it was stock material, printed on the cover but blank on the inside, left over when Amtrak took over passenger service that made its way into the hands of some collector. The collectors association then printed its program on the inside. It is possible that other wildflower paintings were printed on Colorado Room beverage menus, so I’ll keep a watch out for them.

Incidentally, the Railroadiana Collectors Association’s quarterly publication, the Railroadiana Express, has published several articles of mine on dining car menus. The autumn 2020 issue featured some Canadian menus; winter 2020 described Union Pacific menu series; summer 2021 covered Southern Pacific menu series; and the autumn 2021 described Canadian Pacific and Canadian National menu series in detail.