A Better Way to Do Dining Car Service on trains like the LAKESHORE, CAP and SILVER STAR

[Carl Fowler]

This very well done blog is profusely illustrated with how Via presents catered food on the Ocean between Montreal and Halifax. 

All entrees are heated in a bank of ovens—ala the new Amtrak plan. But the presentation evokes proper restaurant service. The diner typically has 2-4 servers, but the same staff out of meal hours actually double as sleeping car attendants and coach porters. Even Amtrak now asks the sleeper attendants to help carry out food or the LSL, Cap and Silver Star, but why not in the diner itself?

Of course this is also very much like what Amtrak itself does in Acela First and to a lesser level of presentation on the diner-lite cars on the Cardinal and the City of Nee Orleans. 

I’ve experienced the Via product many times and can assure you that 90% of riders have no idea these weren’t fully cooked on-Board. Surely we can do better than even the infinitesimally improved offering now on the LSL and the Cap?

Carl Fowler


http://timstraintravels.blogspot.com/2019/01/christmas-2018-most-wonderful-time-of.html

[NKP guy]

What a blog!  What beautiful photographs!

 

It's not right to show these photos to Amtrak customers/passengers, in that it's like dangling red meat beore a hungry dog, or using a laser pointer to frustrate a cat: it's never gonna happen for us.

When Harold Arlen wrote "Over the Rainbow", he must have had Canada in mind.

 

 

 

 

[CMStPnP]

Carl Fowler

he diner typically has 2-4 servers, but the same staff out of meal hours actually double as sleeping car attendants and coach porters. Even Amtrak now asks the sleeper attendants to help carry out food or the LSL, Cap and Silver Star, but why not in the diner itself?

Complete speculation on my part but in a restaurant, typically they require you to take a food handling course for access to a food prep area or to work in a dining area where food is served.   Since the FDA administers Amtrak I am going to go out on a limb and guess there is a similar regulation for who works in a dining car. Ordering from a dining car and walking back to the sleeper like Lyft or Uber do in restaurants now.........probably not covered by any regulation.

Observed food handling in some of the CUS lounges and in my view some of the Amtrak workers using just tap hot water are either not trained properly or not supervised.    For example using hot water by itself to clean a counter top is not going to cut it with any health department, especially if your holding the cleaning cloth with your bare hands (able to tolerate the heat).     In the food service industry they have a blue fluid for disinfecting and cleaning food areas and it is harmless if ingested if diluted properly.    Thats what I used to use in spray bottles when I served the public.

I have a concern about the delivery of food to the sleeping cars though.   Most folks are slobs when it comes to eating and spill the food on the floor the majority of the time.   Given Amtrak sleeping car crews are not the worlds best.   I just openly wonder how long it is before rats are found in the Sleeping Cars while laying over in the coach yards of larger cities.

I think at a minimum Amtrak cleaning crews should use steam cleaning on the carpeted floors, maybe they do but it sure does not look like it.

[Carl Fowler]

Amtrak's attempt to force/encourage taking meals into the sleeper rooms, with their tiny tables, is emblematic of how poorly they thought "New and Contemporary Dining" out. It is a gift to rats!

[JPS1]

Carl Fowler

Amtrak's attempt to force/encourage taking meals into the sleeper rooms, with their tiny tables, is emblematic of how poorly they thought "New and Contemporary Dining" out. It is a gift to rats! 

I grew up in western Pennsylvania in the 1950s.  I frequently took the train to NYC.  We had a lot of choices.  In 1957, the year that I graduated from high school, there were 38 passenger trains movements a day through town.

At Harrisburg, where the diesel locomotives were swapped for a GG1, one or more food and news vendors would board the train to sell food, beverages, and newspapers.  If I remember correctly, they rode to Lancaster, where they detrained for a return run back to Harrisburg.

I always looked forward to a ham and cheese sandwich together with a coke and a bag of chips.  I don't remember seeing any four-legged rats in the coaches.  But from time to time I encountered one or more of the two-legged variety.