Deggestythere were people who made the special effort to eat in diners. I never rode a train just to eat in a diner, but I enjoyed many good meals in railroad diners.
I did!
In 1972 (I think) when Amtrak's Montrealer passed through New Haven, a couple of friends and I boarded there soley to eat in the dining car. We got off at Springfield and hitch-hiked our way home that evening! It was worth the trouble. Two newbies became dining car aficonados that evening.
In 1973, in England, my buddy and I had rail passes and one afternoon and evening took the train to Salisbury and return because it was free for us and we thought British dining cars had better food at cheaper prices than we could find in London. Besides, does anyone remember the state of British food about 1973? I loved watching the waiters walking gingerly on the fast train with huge platters of food as they passed by one's table and served one.
Regarding choosing airlines for their cuisine, in 1970 & 1971 I used to fly American Airlines because they were the only one (serving Cleveland, at any rate) that offered headphones and music. They even sponsored an all-night classical music program which I often enjoyed.
Music isn't food, I know, but people buy tickets and have favorites for all sorts of reasons.
Yes, Dave, back when the railroads were willing to provide good serice to the traveling public, even though there was no real measurale profit in doing so, there were people who made the special effort to eat in diners.
I never rode a train just to eat in a diner, but I enjoyed many good meals in railroad diners.
Johnny
Not really relevant to the discussion, but there was a dinner club that regularly road the Century to Albany and returned on the pick-up sleeper just for the dining car food and experience.
JPS1 Marc6850 Amtrak's accounting is questionable at best. Unless you have access to Amtrak's books, you don't know whether its accounting policies, procedures, and practices comply with GAAP and/or cost accounting principles. By the same token, neither do the Rail Passenger Association irrespective of its claims to the contrary. I don't know of an accounting and/or financial professional that would offer an opinion on an entity's accounting policies, procedures, and practices without access to the books. In fact, if a Texas CPA did so, h/she would lose h/her license.
Marc6850 Amtrak's accounting is questionable at best.
Unless you have access to Amtrak's books, you don't know whether its accounting policies, procedures, and practices comply with GAAP and/or cost accounting principles.
By the same token, neither do the Rail Passenger Association irrespective of its claims to the contrary.
I don't know of an accounting and/or financial professional that would offer an opinion on an entity's accounting policies, procedures, and practices without access to the books. In fact, if a Texas CPA did so, h/she would lose h/her license.
Some folks like the writers for RPA (an advicacy/lobbyist group) and on here like to pretend that they understand accounting practices and somehow can divine knowledge of Amtrak's practices and actual numbers.
Unless you have access to Amtrak's books, you don't know whether its accounting policies, procedures, and practices comply with GAAP and/or cost accounting principles. Neither does the Rail Passenger Association irrespective of its claims to the contrary.
I don't know of an accounting and/or financial professional that would offer an opinion on an entity's accounting policies, procedures, and practices without access to the books. If a Texas CPA did so, h/she would lose h/her license.
Marc 6850: I don't know when you started flying (1955 for me, father started in 1938) but I don't think many people chose the airlines for the dining experience, then or now.
Again, Charlie, I have to remind you, that Federal support is contingent on Amtrak being a National System, and that removal of the LDs makes a collection of a few regional systems, where support will only come frolm the specific regions.
But I agree losses should be cut. The station restaurant scheme could make food service profitable or at least cut the losses while increasing quality. And sleeper passengers should pay the incremental costs while coach passengers should expecdt the treatment one had on the El Capitan or the Florida coach streamliners.
Amtrak's accounting is questionable at best. Food service was never a profit center for the railroads with passenger trains or Amtrak, no more than the availability of a baggage car for carrying property of passengers. It is a service used to attract customers to trains. People used to chose airline flights partly based on food quality, though now they are simply commodity transportation companies with commuter train service quality. I will no longer travel on Amtrak overnight East of the Mississippi River, spending hundreds of dollars for a bedroom, to eat mediocre food. How much money has Amtrak now lost because of my selection of another transportation mode? How many other travelers are making the same travel decision?
Communal bathrooms:
I was at a hospital yesterday. I used the communal public restroom. Clean. Admittedly, no shower.
Communal bathrooms in hotels:
I stay, on occasion, at the Lyle Hotel (Lyle WA). There are communal bathrooms "down the hall". While not luxurious, they are clean. The doors lock.
Communal bathrooms on trains:
In the dome coaches of the Empire Builder in 1965, there were two bathrooms under the dome (men's, women's). They were spacious and clean.
My wife rode on the Orient Express, some years ago (maybe 20-30 years, before I knew her). It had a shower car (apparently discontinued), with an attendant. After looking at our more recent Amtrak-provided 2'x2' shower-above-the-toilet, I decided I would far rather walk down the aisles in a bathrobe than use such a device. We both declined to use it, and waited until we arrived at our destination.
Our own personal toilet:
When traveling alone in a room, I can stand to smell a smelly created by myself, if the ventilation clears it in a minute or two. The same, when sharing a room, is unacceptable.
A real diner compared to a cafeteria-car:
If Amtrak is planning on replacing the diner with some sort of automat/cafeteria car, how about running both cars at once, as an experiment. Then Amtrak can point out that they gave the real diners a chance, but customers didn't want them. It should be noted that Amtrak could try to sabotage/manipulate the experiment. So could the union workers in the diner, by giving fantastic service and excellent food prep. They could even place ads to draw in customers. I do believe there should be an "upcharge" for first class passengers for the diner. And prices for coach travelers would naturally be higher than those for the semi-automat car.
I do suspect the diner would lose the experiment, as there may not be enough customers who want to actually pay for the "improvement". My wife and I have noticed that restaurants are eliminating table cloths, noise suppression, and distance between tables. They, too, are wooing millenials. Not us.
Ed
charlie hebdo Paul of Covington I find it interesting that in a discussion about meals, we covered every aspect from preparation and consumption to the ultimate disposal of the meals. True vertical integration.
Paul of Covington I find it interesting that in a discussion about meals, we covered every aspect from preparation and consumption to the ultimate disposal of the meals.
I find it interesting that in a discussion about meals, we covered every aspect from preparation and consumption to the ultimate disposal of the meals.
True vertical integration.
Arguably some true vertical sequestration too ... there at the end, so to speak.
Well yeah, one thing does lead to another.
_____________
"A stranger's just a friend you ain't met yet." --- Dave Gardner
Flintlock76 n012944 zugmann I don't travel long distance, but who wants a toilet like 6" from their bed? Always seemed nasty to me. There is nothing that says luxury quite like sitting next to where you just got rid of last nights "cold or nuked food". Doesn't that "can" even have a lid on it? If not, I don't know who designed it, but he's definately coming in "Second Place" in the "Game of Thrones!"
n012944 zugmann I don't travel long distance, but who wants a toilet like 6" from their bed? Always seemed nasty to me. There is nothing that says luxury quite like sitting next to where you just got rid of last nights "cold or nuked food".
zugmann I don't travel long distance, but who wants a toilet like 6" from their bed? Always seemed nasty to me.
I don't travel long distance, but who wants a toilet like 6" from their bed?
Always seemed nasty to me.
There is nothing that says luxury quite like sitting next to where you just got rid of last nights "cold or nuked food".
Doesn't that "can" even have a lid on it?
If not, I don't know who designed it, but he's definately coming in "Second Place" in the "Game of Thrones!"
charlie hebdo n012944 zugmann I don't travel long distance, but who wants a toilet like 6" from their bed? Always seemed nasty to me. There is nothing that says luxury quite like sitting next to where you just got rid of last nights "cold or nuked food". Where is that photo?
Where is that photo?
An "expensive model collector"
York1 Communal Toilets -- There's a difference between using a communal toilet on a three-hour plane flight or train ride, and spending an overnight in a bedroom. How many of us are comfortable checking into a hotel with 10 hotel rooms sharing one bathroom?
Communal Toilets -- There's a difference between using a communal toilet on a three-hour plane flight or train ride, and spending an overnight in a bedroom. How many of us are comfortable checking into a hotel with 10 hotel rooms sharing one bathroom?
And yet long haul aircraft, the longest non stop fight is now almost 19 hours long, still use communal toilets. I did 14 hours from Sydney to LA, which is longer than I stay in some hotels, and did't have a private toilet, no issues there. Seems like the same to me...
That was acceptable in the pre-World War One era, although most of the better quality hotels had lavatories down the end of the hall with bath, wash, and toilet facilities. Even today some college dorms have communal showers down the end of the floor, but with "half-baths" for the rooms.
Just for general knowledge, even the Titanic only had full-baths in the most expensive first-class suites, everyone else, lavatories, even in first class.
It was one of the reasons Titanic's sister ship Olympic was taken out of service in the 1930's, first-class passengers by that time considered the old-style sanitary facilites unacceptable and it would have cost too much to upgrade the ship.
Eras change, expectations change. Just the way it is.
Overmod : I have no idea of his motivation for continuing to make those claims. All I can say is that spring 2018 I rode an IC on the DB which still had older equipment. I was in a combination grill and first class coach car manned by one person. I decided to have a hot meal, Koenigsberger Klops. It was very good and so I asked the attendant how they reheat. He said even older cars got re-equipped with convection ovens. Work fine, no fires.
CMStPnPI suspect they use more power, generate more heat..... and they are an increased fire hazard which might trigger additional insurance or laws regarding how they are housed as well as ventilation.
You keep repeating this as though it were true, I assume thinking that because you have fast-casual experience people will believe you know about it.
They use less power, the heat they use is transferred in convection from moving air rather than by direct radiation or the equivalent of 'natural circulation' as in a normal oven, and they are certainly not an increased fire hazard by any insurance underwriter's definition (at least if responsibly constructed).
You'll notice in some of the various sub shops they avoid heating elements such as convective ovens to avoid the added insurance or leasing costs.
As I noted already, it's not 'heating elements' they're avoiding; it's the paraphernalia involved with grills and the need to provide grease traps, filters in air vents, etc. which add tremendous cost to converting a 20' storefront to a 'restaurant' and pose maintenance issues. Subway uses the equivalent of pizza ovens to 'toast' their subs on request; a convection oven involves no direct radiant heat exposure to the food so any prospective issues would be actually less than that chain, whose business model involves lowest-cost conversion of storefronts, already accepts.
Firehouse Subs uses boiling water to heat the innards of a sandwich which is in a plastic sealed packet.........that they then squeeze out onto the sandwich like toothpaste after it is heated.
They probably save a couple thou in franchise buildout cost by not having an oven. But they lose quite a bit of attractiveness by not effectively melting the cheese on the sandwich, being able to toast the bun, etc. In my opinion at least some of their sandwiches (the mixed pastrami/corned beef being a recent example) benefited dramatically from something as simple as a microwave reheat; a brief turn in a convection oven would likely produce much the same improvement a bit slower, and certainly better if you combined the sous vide wet-filling heating (which is probably superior to radiant or air-convective heating for meats either au jus or in sauce) with a little post-prep direct heat.
Again: a pure convection oven operates much the same as one of the sous-vide circulators: it heats air with an enclosed element in the recirculation duct, not with exposed Calrod elements in a stratified enclosed box, and with even the most rudimentary sort of overheat protection found in hair dryers their likelihood of ignition is slim. Power consumption is of course proportional to expected heating capacity, but they are certainly as power-efficient as any alternative method of generating the same heat in the same volume of food in a given time. (It remains to be seen whether the sort of 'far IR' methods used to sell high-dollar hair dryers would actually produce improvements in heat uptake in convection ovens employing 'tourmaline' or such technology...)
York 1: Hotel bedroom with comunal toilet? Typical of the lowest-cost hotel rooms in Israel. Of course, Army and Air Force barracks and even Bachelors Ofiicers Quarters, and College and University dormitories. These dormitories often serve as hotel rooms for important and distinguished visitors attending university on-campus conferences. Never heard one complaint at any of the professional society conventions I attended, on this issue, Boston University, Ohio State University, and back at MIT among others.
Regarding sleeping in the same room as an exposed toilet. The classic roomettes hid the toilet when the bed was down and in use, essentially isolating it when one was sleeping. During the day I would spend most time in the lounge car and diner. On my very last USA long distance trip, W. Palm Beach - NYC, Jan. or Feb. 1996, my roomette turned out to be the attendant's room at the end of the car. I did not mind being over the wheels so much as the exposed toilet, not under the bed. My solution was to request a hanger from the porter (he serving two cars) and hang my heavy winter raincoat from a ventilation grille forming a partition between the end of the bed and the toilet.
York1Maybe someone who has used one of these bedrooms could tell us.
That is actually a combination toilet shower and the second picture shows the adjoining bedrooms on each Superliner there is one pair I believe that adjoins the problem with the adjoining bedroom (yes I paid for one) is you need the conductor to use a key to open the partition and close and lock it. Really a bother. Sliding the partition by yourself without the lock (it's very heavy because it is also a crash bulkhead so it is a steel door) and it will rock back open during the night. In the two cases I rented an adjoining room you needed two men to get the door to slide open to a large enough crack where you could slide your hand in and open it the rest of the way. The train conductor was not strong enough to do it himself (sad), so I had to help from the other side of the partition. Again it is a steel door so it is heavy.
The toilets in the Deluxe Bedrooms do not smell with the enclosed space. The bad thing is when you take a shower everything in there gets wet and water droplets on it.....including the toilet. The good thing is the exhaust fan is designed also to dry that water up so if you close the door in about 2-3 hours the toilet is dry again. You take a good sized dump in there though and part of it sticks to the stainless steel bowl and it is going to smell just like it does in the communal bathrooms. So I never tested that part in my travels. So again even in the enclosed compartment in a bedroom if the toilet is used for #2 you need to get the bowl cleaned if the flushing does not clean it. The car attendent should check and do that when they change the bedding. It is part of both upkeep of the car and housekeeping of the compartment. I have never tested this though. Typically in a bedroom if I had to do #2 I used the communal bathrooms so my seperate toilet would not smell......being the considerate traveler I am.
I was given an accessible room to sit in while my compartment was made up for the next traveler (Room H). My experience differs from Diggesty's.........the one I sat in for 10 min until I could not stand the *** smell any longer and moved elsewhere was nasty. The toilet is up on a kind of formica shelf and only a curtain seperates it from the rest of the compartment and it stank like a country outhouse. Now the attendant had to know it stank before she offered it to me to sit in......so what does that say about the attendent and customer service. First it was "Excuse me sir another person is boarding in Dallas that has paid for this compartment, can you please go sit in our rolling cesspool that we call room H?"
I was disembarking in Dallas, so I did not mind the move (which honestly, should I be inconvienenced because Amtraks Arrow reservation system is not designed enough to prevent this? .....probably not). However the attendent had to know of the smell and moved me there anyway. Classic Amtrak automatron. Do what your trained with no adjustment to external conditions.
Yes, the bedrooms (except for the family bedrooms, which have no plumbing, and the Superliner accessible bedrooms, which have the toilet on the opposite side of the car from the berths and have no shower--the community shower is a short distance away) have the toilet/shower in an annex, which is quite small==and the door does not fit as tightly as it should (I always put a hand towel on the room floor just outside the door).
Incidentally, there is no "easy chair" in any bedroom; they all have hard seats, and these chairs do have arms that can be turned up. I am not sure that whoever drew the pictures ever saw even photograph of a room, much less was in one.
There is not a great deal of room in a bedroom--and room A in Superliners has even less room. Room H(handicapped) in Viewliners is larger than A or B; you can carry a wheelchair in one. I can stow my rollator in a Viewliner bedroom, but ut is a bit awkward. When riding in a regular bedroom in a Superliner, I leave my rollator downstairs; sometimes it is placed in the luggage rack and sometimes it is left in the entry.
Looking at the Amtrak diagrams for bedrooms, it looks like the toilets are in separate rooms, much like any hotel, except on a much more cramped scale. I guess it's not like you're sleeping right next to the toilet.
Maybe someone who has used one of these bedrooms could tell us.
York1 John
DeggestyWhen the new union station in New Orleans was opened
Better days for New Orleans maybe just around the corner. There is very serious talk and action on restoring New Orleans to Mobile Corridor Passenger trains. We will see if that happens in the next 2-3 years or is just talk. However there is talk also of a New Orleans to Jacksonville train though not much ethusiasm behind it as NO to Mobile.
spsffanAgreed. I wouldn't want a toilet in my bedroom at home. Why would I want one on a train? And who wants to use the toilet with your travel mate in the room? As far a it goes, although I've occasionally encountered uncleaned restrooms on Amtrak LD trains, it is the exception rather than the rule. This includes trains on the end of their journey (aka SW Chief from Albq. to Lax).
The compartments and bedrooms in the heavyweight sleepers had no annexes for the toilets; the drawing rooms did have annexes. Those in lightweight sleepers did have annexes.
York1 charlie hebdo You missed the point. Some on here want to maintain/improve a totally out of date mode of transportation. I'm just pointing out just how out of touch they are. No, I got your point, and I agree with it. I just poorly worded another example of how times change. Sorry.
charlie hebdo You missed the point. Some on here want to maintain/improve a totally out of date mode of transportation. I'm just pointing out just how out of touch they are.
No, I got your point, and I agree with it. I just poorly worded another example of how times change. Sorry.
+1
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.