Dinner in the diner: it's tough to make it finer

I returned to Washington, DC from a conference in Minneapolis last weekend via Amtrak. At least I intended to go the whole way by train. In the past, I would have simply booked a through reservation from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Washington, with connection at Chicago. However, for the last few months, due to the Empire Builder’s chronically poor timekeeping, the guaranteed connections from the eastbound Builder to all trains at Chicago except the City of New Orleans and Lake Shore Limited have been severed. This was originally only going to be the case until September 3, but appears to have been extended indefinitely.  

On my most recent Builder trip in August (with the Millennial Trains Project), I could not fault host BNSF Railway for not giving the Builder priority. Though we were stopped several times awaiting the clearance of traffic ahead of us, we were never sidetracked while an eastbound freight passed, and we were moved ahead of several eastbounds. From Whitefish to St. Paul, and from there to Milwaukee the next day, we were 3 hours late. I had been checking the train status after that and saw that train 8 had been making it to Chicago by 6:00 PM CDT about two thirds of the time, so I took my chances. I made separate reservations: St. Paul to Chicago in coach and Chicago to Washington on the Capitol Limited in a Roomette.

I woke up early on the morning of my departure from the Twin Cities to text alerts from Amtrak that train 8 was running over four hours late. Luckily, I had a backup. I canceled my St. Paul-Chicago reservation and booked a Minneapolis-Milwaukee reservation on a Megabus that would get me to Milwaukee two hours ahead of the 3:00 PM Amtrak Hiawatha departure that would allow me to make the connection to the Capitol Limited. The bus was delayed an hour leaving St. Paul, but thankfully it lost no further time with hardly any traffic on I-94 and, with a half-hour rest stop at a gas station near Tomah, WI, we made it to Milwaukee by 2:00 PM. I could have taken the bus on to Chicago, but decided to break up the trip and get lunch in Milwaukee. Even though I had the seat facing the front window on the upper level of the bus, atop the driver, it’s still impossible for the view from an Interstate to match the intimacy with the landscape achieved on a train. And Megabus’s much-vaunted WiFi was painstakingly slow. 

I slept well that night in my Roomette in the transition sleeper on the Capitol, and as I always do on trains, I enjoyed meeting interesting people from different places over meals in the dining car. For all but two of those I met, this was their first long-distance train trip in the US. The food service, however, was very slow. This has been the case for the last two or three years as Amtrak, primarily in response to Congressional pressure to eliminate food and beverage losses, has cut dining car staffs down to three on all long-distance trains: two servers and one chef, usually handling well over 200 passengers at four to six seatings for every meal. This trip was no exception: it took some fifteen minutes after being seated for the server to take our orders, and another 20 to 30 minutes to be served, then another 10-15 minutes to settle up the tab for any items not included in the sleeper fare. All this considered, our servers had a great attitude and kept calm and upbeat despite a good deal of pressure. 

I tried to explain to my fellow passengers that the dining cars are woefully understaffed and that Congress is ultimately to blame. But the prevailing sentiment was that, given the high fares Amtrak is charging for sleepers these days — a good deal more than coach airfare in most cases and comparable to first-class airfare in some cases — passengers deserve a high level of service, and I can’t blame them. 

Railroads historically, and cruise ships and resorts still, have always treated food service as a loss leader: a part of the overall package that is not intended to make a profit on its own, but instead serves to enhance the larger product and contribute to its bottom line. Yet Congress continues to not understand this concept: the proposed Passenger Rail Reform and Investment Act (PRRIA 2014) that the House Transportation Committee approved on Wednesday requires Amtrak to break even on food & beverage service alone within 5 years of enactment or lose federal funding thereafter. 

The couple I had dinner with on the Capitol asked why Amtrak couldn’t contract out food service to a major restaurant brand. I explained to them that the idea has been floated at least once (when Amtrak attempted to contract out Empire Service cafe cars to Subway Restaurants in 2005) but was stillborn. The biggest concern, rightly raised by Amtrak’s labor unions, is that on-board food service workers have more complex jobs and safety-critical responsibilities than restaurant workers, and Subway employees would not have been able to assist the crew in case of an emergency. Because of this, they are paid higher wages than other food-service workers, which is entirely fair. In addition, the logistics of stocking and managing trains’ food offerings are more difficult and costly than for a stationary restaurant. However, cruise lines and resorts have been known to profit from alcohol sales, so marketing a decent selection of beer, wine and liquor in a bar car-type setting could be a fruitful avenue for Amtrak.

Amtrak is caught between a rock and a hard place in seeking to meet customers’ expectations for first-class service while pleasing the bean counters on Capitol Hill. All of the ways out of this bind involve some up-front investment in order to realize an improved bottom line in the long run. Ultimately, the long-distance train network needs to expand so that Amtrak can take advantage of a better revenue-to-fixed-cost ratio and economies of scale in both labor and provisions, which would allow dining cars to be properly staffed and perhaps more locally-sourced and sustainably-grown food choices to be offered. Until such investment is made, though, Amtrak has little choice but to keep doing what it’s been doing for its entire history: make lemonade out of lemons.