Deutsche Bundesbahn and its McTrain... Mickey D's 1990's iteration of on-board cuisine

[samfp1943]

So here we are:  New Year's Eve of 2020...Hopefully, we'll survive the chaos of the last year, and the New Year will be easier on most of us...

   Found the following story in "The Drive" an electic, on-line publication I find of interest.

I was drawn to this article after reading a number of Threads on the TRAINS Forums about Poster's experiences of "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" Tales of AMTRAK Dining Experiences.

The article is linked @ https://www.thedrive.com/news/38221/the-mctrain-the-rise-and-fall-of-mcdonalds-ambitious-plan-to-conquer-the-railroads

article by By James Gilboy December 24, 2020

"The McTrain: The Rise and Fall of McDonald's Ambitious Plan to Conquer the Railroads"    "It sounded like a great idea—until it wasn't."

"The link also has photos of the McTrain Cars."

FTA:"...Regardless of where you spot the McDonald's Golden Arches, they always stand for the same thing: A cheap place to get a quick, sometimes-tasty meal made with processed meat, canola oil, and corn syrup. These ingredients commonly take the form of the Big Mac, but also make up various regional offerings, such as McShrimp in Russia, or taro pie in China. The establishments themselves also sometimes deviate from the expected norm, taking the forms of kitschy faux-Bavarian inns, barber shops, and for a brief period in Germany during the 1990s, a train car. Not some decommissioned railcar turned into a diner, but an actual dining car that served on a long-distance passenger route. But as Mickey D's found out the hard way, running a stationary restaurant is one thing, and operating one that crosses a country daily is something completely different..."

THus begins the tale of DB's McTrain!  FTA:'...The "McTrain," as it is unofficially known, reportedly got its start in 1992, when the Deutsche Bundesbahn (German Federal Railway) agreed to try outsourcing catering on long-distance routes to McDonald's..."

 

 

[Overmod]

There's more to this than meets the casual eye, and I look forward to seeing one of our native German-speakers confirm some of the details specifically.  

A normal McDonald's at the time involved a certain amount of physical plant, and a minimum number of employees, to operate even a relatively limited set of menu options.  There is no indication of how the car 'kitchen' space was laid out to facilitate that, nor of whether this used the 'old' McDonald's system of preparing common items ahead of time and using hot-lights or strategic microwaving at presentation.  Mention is made, though, that some provisioning and restocking was done 'out of McDonalds station restaurants along the train's route'.

I do note an indication that a fixed staff of 5 was required to run the operation, plus whatever might be involved with the local restaurants, and this is going to be a 'non-starter' other than on a highly subsidized basis already.  (It could be imagined how the costs would balloon if service were to be provided on this scale across larger American distances...)

In order to satisfy perceived demand, a whole second menu of more 'German' food was apparently offered out of the same facility -- I am not sure whether the 'two complete meals' changed, but I cannot imagine Wiener-wurst, spaghetti, and  "traditional" dining-car-style meals being something particularly compatible with the McDonald's system.  Reading a bit between the lines, it's possible that DB intended the "McDonald's" outsourcing to fulfill traditional expectations for minimal dining-car service as well as to be a 'rolling hamburger stand'.  That would be a mistake for an operation transplanting its operating system into a confined rolling environment...

Then it appears that at-your-seat ordering was provided.  This was remarked on as 'saving time' when people went to the car to pick up their meals.  It doesn't say that the 'waiters' brought the food back to the seats -- it also doesn't say how the billing for the items was done, or what the percentage of unpaid food was.  I can see some interesting consequences for quality of service, probably including cleanup.  I do notice that McDonalds was trying a variant of 'waiter' service delivery when it introduced the abortive order-it-yourself kiosks; I have yet to eat in one restaurant with significant patronage where the need to bring food out to randomly-seated patrons did not throw a wrench into smooth regular operation of the restaurant.  I suspect that involved a relatively shorter distance than much of the remote second-class order=-taking, too.

Finally it appears that demand in the 1990s was insufficient to carry the large fixed costs, although it 'might be' today.  If I read the post correctly, for each entire weekend there was insufficient demand to carry the operation, there not being commuters to buy some of the food.  The text appears to be saying that DB made further economizing cutbacks in provided services after 1995, although the language is a bit cryptic on the point, and I don't know the relevant actual history.  Someone here will know.

This is not at all how one would apply the lessons of the McDonald's fast-food model to expedient rail transportation; in fact it's hard to imagine more places to make serious missteps...

[CMStPnP]

Basic problem I see is limited foot traffic tied to actual ridership on the train would limit profitability.   Fixed location on land you can increase foot traffic via promotions and folks will drive to the location or if in the city make their way there.   If on a train your limited to people already on the train and only those that prefer McDonald's food.    Most Amtrak Dining Cars would still fail if they were exactly like what the Private Railroads ran because Amtrak's ridership on most of it's run does not support the headcount needed to make the Dining Car profitable.

So you have to fundamentally change the Dining Car in design and in staffing to lower cost of delivery of food.   Even then I am not sure feeding 100-150 people would generate a profit.   If you had an Amtrak train like say AUTO TRAIN which the ridership is regularly 500-600.........possibility to restructure the dining car service to be marginal or break even.    But with the existing way Amtrak staffs it's dining cars, even at that ridership count I am not sure it would work financially.

Now the European model of corridor trains.   I would tend to think most folks traveling in Europe are only on a train for a few hours because the cities are so close together and the trains are higher speed.   So what would be the chances you would have a captive clientele on the European train that did not already have a meal prior to boarding or planned on a meal after they deboarded the train?    I am sure that would be a larger problem on a European train compared to Amtrak.

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

As far back as the 1930's, dining cars were viewed as loss leaders since, although they were not profitable, they were viewed as part of the level of service expected on premier trains.

[Overmod]

CMStPnP

So you have to fundamentally change the Dining Car in design and in staffing to lower cost of delivery of food.

I get the impression from the story that DB only outsourced the contract to McDonald's if they preserved some 'minimum expected standard' of regular dining-car fare aside from whatever the '90s mix of McD products was.  That, all by itself, might have sunk the eventual 'profitability' of the venture as a whole.

It's also pretty clear that the economics on the McD side were highly leveraged on the idea of being able to replenish fresh stock from any of the station restaurants.  This bears on the version of the 'operational model' that Dave Klepper recommended: do all the food prep, as much of the commissary function, and inherently the incremental waste removal "distributed" and as nearly "just-in-time" as good Netz-B-style scheduling could make it.  

Perhaps McDonalds thought the advantages of this were so self-evident they didn't work through the implications of the five-man crew, or the marginal cost of offloading some of the costs onto the station restaurants.  It would not have been difficult either to 'cost this out' in some reasonable way or to coordinate costs with the fixed restaurants to give a proper allocation for the dining-service cost estimates.

I believe the point about the 'captive clientele' was mentioned in the article.  I got the impression there was considerable, ah, 'misunderstanding' about the kind of food you would get in a "McDonalds-branded" diner, which (again reading a bit between the lines) did not improve over the period of the experiment.  It could be argued that patronage might have increased with additional time, as the author commented, but with the given mix of 'features' and staffing I have to think that any additional time would be more perhaps hand-over-fist loss, with no publicity upside from the exposure.

[charlie hebdo]

OM: I am not a native German speaker (I think they have all been driven away) though quite fluent and very familiar with many DB routes for 52 years.  This experiment was very limited number of routes and time span.  I never rode a train with one of those Wagens in the consist, although I saw one sitting in a siding in Koblenz.  I'm not surprised by their failure. Dining cars (Bord Restaurant) and their downsized cousins such as Bord Bistro, are not heavily patronized on trains for years

 As I have noted before,  the food is actually quite good and fairly cheap.  Mickey Ds is not as popular there as here.  Their primary patronage is younger people,  who often take food with them for the journey,  as do many others,  just getting beverages and snacks as carts pass through. 

[CMStPnP]

Overmod

McDonalds

So one thing was the McDonalds product was uniform in Germany and tasted the same as it did here in the states.    Not so much with "hamburgers" at roadside stands and regular restaurants.   In some cases the hamburgers over there had kind of a sweet taste to them.    I suspected maybe they had horse meat mixed in but who knows.......could have been mad cow disease for all I know.

[beaulieu]

There were also two McDonald's Restaurant cars on the SBB in Switzerland. If I remember correctly they were cars in the middle of a 12 car set circulating on the Romanshorn - Brig Regional Express service (passing through St. Gallen, Winterthur,Zurich, and Bern).

[Overmod]

charlie hebdo

Dining cars (Bord Restaurant) and their downsized cousins such as Bord Bistro, are not heavily patronized on trains for years

I suspect that part of the 'pitch' made by McDonalds was that their food additions would result in more on-train patronage, at lower than 'marginal' additional cost.  Where they made a mistake was in assuming that the additional traditional service could be carried at a low enough marginal cost to be effectively subsidized by the economies of the McDonalds operating systems.  Whether that was before or after the question of actual 'focus-group' or other testing about 'would you patronize McDonalds on particular DB services or trains' I have no idea -- but it would not be typical of McDonald's not to do extensive testing before undertaking either the idea or the expensive and brand-associated buildouts needed to provide the perceived benefits.

The idea of getting chain 'economies of scale' involved in railroad food is a fairly old one; it underpinned most of the early excuses for food service both in Britain and in the United States, and of course the earlier versions of 'hotel cars' before the more-perfected and hideously-unprofitable Pullman system for formal diners was adopted.  With respect to McDonald's it is not difficult to see -- if you have ever worked in one or know someone who has -- why the operation does not scale to railroad 'packaging', even if there is a stable co-located base of station McDonalds that can circulate personnel and provide commissary or even sous-vide cooked material at reasonably frequent intervals with nominally marginal additional staff cost.  That does not inherently mean that another system -- Firehouse Subs immediately suggesting itself as an applicable model -- might not potentially work.  But neither name recognition nor menu choices make Firehouse a 'sole provider' category for onboard food... which promptly leads back to whether 'government' or other external agency should, or even ought to, subsidize food choice as a 'service associated with transportation' (or something) as they do for the transportation itself.  Very clearly the DB of that and the following era did not subscribe to that idea...

[charlie hebdo]

Duplicate 

[charlie hebdo]

Simply put:

#1 My opinion is that the McDonald's brand does not have the same value in Germany then or now as it does here.  

#2 The Mickey D cars only ran on a few lines so that it was hit or (mostly) miss for the public to ever experience one.

#3 The DB trial 26 years ago foes not generalize to US with Amtrak. 

[Overmod]

#3 is the salient point ... but I would argue that many of its lessons and probable mistaken assumptions are generalizable, and applicable, to what a "McDonalds car" on different kinds of Amtrak service would involve.

I did look in some detail at the possibility of implementing a limited Burger King menu as part of the Amtrak diner project in the mid-Seventies, but that did not involve different or alternative menus, or a full range of products.  However, it also did not depend on the support of 'station restaurants' or nearby chain outlets, which hurt quite a bit of the logistics.  The real showstopper was the personnel, for a variety of reasons.  

[matthewsaggie]

But McD's in Germany do have beer, which has to be a point in their favor, at least on my score card.