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.

Today’s menu doesn’t have a date, but I suspect it was from 1936 because it has the same prices as the other menus. Unlike the Rio Grande, which always used color photos on its glued-on covers, the Burlington used illustrations or colorized black-and-white photos. Kodachrome had just been released in 1935 and had not yet made inroads into railroad advertising.

The cover on today’s menu shows a river running through a forest with a mountain in the background. This appears to represent the Crystal River and Mount Sopris, a scene that would be used by the Rio Grande on a 1940s glued-on photo menu as well as a 1950s photo menu and another in the 1960s.