A word I probably neither used nor heard for the last 50 years! A miniature elevator, using hand powered with ropes, usually to bring dishes and food from a kitchen to a dining room or serving area.
Hoe was food brought from the kitchen to the dining aea in the UP's dome diners?
RIDEWITHMEHENRY is the name for our almost monthly day of riding trains and transit in either the NYCity or Philadelphia areas including all commuter lines, Amtrak, subways, light rail and trolleys, bus and ferries when warranted. No fees, just let us know you want to join the ride and pay your fares. Ask to be on our email list or find us on FB as RIDEWITHMEHENRY (all caps) to get descriptions of each outing.
Don't know about the UP dining cars, but the AT&SF bhigh level diners for the El Capitan used dumbwaiters to move food from the kitchen on the lower level to the dining area on the upper level.
IIRC, Superliner diners have a similar arrangement.
Tje El Cap diners: One dumbwaiter per car? Hand powered or electrically driven?
Anyone know about the UP dome diners?
Glad to say I ate in both types. But didn't have sense to investigate.
UP Dome Diners had a dumbwaiter on the kitchen (non-stairway) end of the dome. Trainweb has a diagram showing it to be under the left pillar.
http://trainweb.org/DOMEmain/picUPdiagramb.jpg
El Cap and Superliner diners each have one dumbwaiter opposite the crew stairwell.
NP's rebuilt 4-2-4 buffet lounge domes got a dumbwaiter from the buffet up to the dome area when they were rebuilt from 4-4-4 sleepers.
Amtrak does not officially use the term "dumbwaiter", probably because it's not politically correct.
Superliner dining cars have two food service elevators each, one "clean" and one "dirty". Prepared food goes up in the clean one; dirty dishes go down in the dirty one. In spite of Amtrak's official name for them, we always called them the "clean dummy" or the "dirty dummy". Proper use of these two elevators for their respective intended purposes is rigidly enforced.
They were supposed to be labeled "Food Service Elevator", but some got labels that called them evelators (sic). I think some of those incorrect labels may still be out there running. Take a look next time you ride in a Superliner-equipped train.
Sorry I can't address the question about U.P.'s dome diners.
Tom
ACY Amtrak does not officially use the term "dumbwaiter", probably because it's not politically correct. Superliner dining cars have two food service elevators each, one "clean" and one "dirty". Prepared food goes up in the clean one; dirty dishes go down in the dirty one. In spite of Amtrak's official name for them, we always called them the "clean dummy" or the "dirty dummy". Proper use of these two elevators for their respective intended purposes is rigidly enforced. They were supposed to be labeled "Food Service Elevator", but some got labels that called them evelators (sic). I think some of those incorrect labels may still be out there running. Take a look next time you ride in a Superliner-equipped train. Sorry I can't address the question about U.P.'s dome diners. Tom
Of course, now that many waiters and waitresses introduce themselves, saying, "I'm your server," perhaps the age-long nouns will be retired. It would be wonderful to know that no one never again said, "I waiter," or, "I waitress."
Johnny
As to Tom's bottom note, which was not copied in the quotation--"it looks like the diagram shows just one dumbwaiter on the U.P. cars. The FDA wouldn't like that nowadays. Unless I'm missing something," perhaps that is why the diners were retired?
Of course I can't speak for the FDA, but I doubt that would be the main reason to retire the cars, and it probably wouldn't even be a secondary reason. There would be ways around the limitation.
A second elevator could probably be installed somewhere, or it might be possible to designate the elevator as clean or dirty, but not both. That would mean using the stairs for the other items. That's what we had to do when one of the "dummies" broke down on the Superliners. It really hurt the efficiency of the operation and was a serious pain in the hind quarters, but it was doable. If you want a REAL adventure, try working a full Superliner diner with BOTH dummies out of commission!
I gather that unlike the dumbwaiter in my parents' Manhattan West 85th Street home, all these dumbwaiters are electrically driven, not hand pulled on a rope.
Deggesty ACY Amtrak does not officially use the term "dumbwaiter", probably because it's not politically correct. Not "politically correct"? It is true that not everyone living today has heard the word. But--there is a difference between a "dumbwaiter" and a "dumb waiter"--which expression can be used to refer to a waiter who does not execute proper thought processes.
ACY Amtrak does not officially use the term "dumbwaiter", probably because it's not politically correct.
I'm reasonably sure the "dumb" is not meant to connote dimness but the inability to speak ... as in the old "deaf and dumb." A roundabout way, to be sure, of identifying the waiter as mechanical rather than human.
At the same time, I'm sure ACY is correct about "politically incorrect." Given today's lazy lack of precision in speech, most people would probably think "dumbwaiter" was intended as an insult to the machine ... even, perhaps, by extension, as an insult to all waiters.
Remember the trouble a college professor got into a couple of years back for his use, in the classroom, of the word "niggardly"?
Shoulda said, re. retirement of UP's dome diners: The explanation I always read, in TRAINS, was economy. The dome diners required an extra hand or two, an expense that became insupportable in the last few years of the "City" trains.
The etymology of the term "dumbwaiter" is "dumb" = silent, mute, + "waiter".
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
Yes, they're electrically driven. Cables instead of ropes. They're a bit noisy, but they work pretty well unless a cable breaks, or the cable slips a pulley, or there's a problem with the doors, or something else happens. Maybe the design could be improved, but I think a mechanical device that is 20+ years old, has outside doors as well as inside doors, plus the electrical and mechanical apparatus to run it, and is subjected to lateral forces while it's trying to go up and down.............. Well, you can see there's the potential for occasional problems. Considering those factors, maybe we should be surprised that they don't fail more often. When that happens, we still have the stairs.
There was never a dull moment, working those diners.
There's an upper and a lower door on the dumbwaiter itself, and an upper and lower door on the opening that leads to the dumbwaiter. They work like a clamshell, except that there are no curved surface; the doors are all in parallel planes. I've seen situations where a tray of food went into the dummy and the door clipped the edge of a plate. In the most extreme cases, it could flip the plate like a tiddley-wink and distribute the food all over the inside of the dummy and any other dinner plates that are in there.
All we could do was clean up the mess,replace the dinners, and apologize to the passengers for the delay. Then laugh it off & get back to work.
(Anybody here old enough to remember tiddley-winks?)
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.