As much as I have enjoyed the dining car experience over years of train travel I sense the experience is now running on borrowed time. High salaries, waste, and theft have all contributed to continuing losses.
Prepared food doesn’t have to taste terrible (as was my experience on the northbound City of New Orleans). Good, healthy prepared meals are a BIG business today. Just drop by Whole Foods, Kroger, Safeway, etc, or any number of independent food preparer establishments (Hello Fresh, Snap Kitchen) and see the many people who take these meals home to heat and eat. Good food and very convenient.
What if AMTRAK converted part of a diner (maybe the downstairs kitchen area) into a series of high-end (yes, they are out there) vending machines with many good, healthy, food choices that would regularly change? One employee could oversee the operation and also service the tables, thus, less overhead. Machines could be restocked at the end point before turning back to the originating city. Machines could also offer various kinds of drinks and desserts (some frozen).
These meals could be of better quality and priced less than the high-prices currently charged in the diner. I have heard many sleeper passengers say that if the meals weren’t included in the price of their ticket they would bring food aboard rather than pay the high prices charged for the mediocre food now served.
It may be out-of-the-box thinking but it’s an option. I could be mistaken but I recall vending machine/cafe cars on some trains in Europe.
I understand that it went very badly because Amtrak’s unions threw a hissy fit and helped kill the experiment before it even had an opportunity to prove itself.
If Amtrak’s high-end customers want a high-end dining experience on a long-distance train, getting it is relatively easy. All they need to do is signal management that they are prepared to cover the full cost of their high-end meal and not look to the taxpayers to subsidize it.
Amtrak’s looses annually tens of millions of dollars on its food and beverage services. As several independent audits have shown, more than 95 percent of the losses are attributable to the long-distance trains.
Pre-prepared foods have come a long, long way since the SP’s automat cars.
Most of the food served in Amtrak’s long-distance dining cars is pre-prepared. It is just warmed up by the chef.
Several months ago, I tried the steamed mussels on the Texas Eagle. I was a bit skeptical about the offering, but I decided to give it a go. They were surprisingly good.
I am certain that in your area of employment if some one is out to eliminate your job area you won’t just accept it without question. You would throw all the Hissy you could manage to retain your employment. That is human nature.
Money and jobs scratch all backs. You have to give something to get something - it was true for the hunter gathers and it is true today.
It depends on how jobs are eliminated and workers are reassigned or let go.
I worked for a Fortune 200 Corporation. Because of a changing market, we had to reorganize the company. Big time! Management offered early retirement and voluntary separation packages to every employee. Of the 18,500 folks employed by the company, approximately 2,300 took the early retirement option and 2,450 took the voluntary separation package.
Throughout my career I knew that I could lose my job anytime by just saying the wrong thing or getting crosswise with my boss. It went with the territory. I did not worry about it. I was not threatened by change; I knew I could get another job quickly.
I don’t know how Amtrak handled the push back on the out sourcing of food service. Based on what I read, it did not even get a reasonable opportunity to test the concept.
Nothing was said about any of Amtrak’s food and beverage employees losing their job. Amtrak has enough wiggle room in the size of its labor force that it probably could have found another job for any displaced employee.
It is human nature to resist change. But sometimes people and organizations do it without thinking through the consequences, which can be more harmful in the long run than helping to manage it constructively. &nb
When you are fighting for your life you can only think about the present - it is the survival instinct in the human animal. https://www.pbs.org/program/amazing-human-body/ If you don’t survive in the present, the future has no meaning.
Dining car service has always been operated at a loss, at least as far back as the 1920’s, probably earlier. The railroads were willing to eat the loss since they felt it was a necessary adjunct to a passenger train.
That was then! This is now! When the investor owned railroads absorbed the food and beverage losses, it was on their shareholders. Amtrak’s losses are on the taxpayers.
A case can be made for the taxpayers to subsidize the direct costs of operating passenger trains, at least to the extent that competitive modes of passenger transport are subsidized by the taxpayers. But the taxpayers should not be subsidizing food and beverages on a train.
More than 85 percent of Amtrak’s passengers ride a corridor train. They are only on it for a relatively short period of time. If they don’t want to pay the full cost of F&B on the train, they can buy it before they board or wait until they get to their destination.
What good did throwing a hissy fit do for the union? Food service on NYC- Albany trains was discontinued altogether and the union employees lost their jobs anyway and, passengers now don’t have the option of buying food on the trains. Lose - lose all around due to union greed. Well, maybe Amtrak didn’t lose because now they don’t have to absorb the losses on food service for these trains.
When I read the title of this topic, I thought it would be about bringing in some super-chef to do high-end dining. Or maybe a kiosk car, where there’d be several small operations.
As I have remarked on another thread or two, my trip to the East Coast recently taught me that what Amtrak now offers on the Capitol and Lake Shore is not as good as the box meals that I bought while traveling by train in the sixties. At that time, I never bought a breakfast, but the lunches and suppers that I did buy were superior to the box meals now offered–small portions of a variety of items, half-ripe melon and mango which require good teeth to eat–all served cold.
It was a great pleasure to eat in the diner on the Zephyr after eating on the two other trains.
I don’t want to discourage the brainstorming here but I’m going to comment based on my past experience in the fast casual dining experience world…
Agree 100%.
Actually, I think those alternatives taste horrible as well. I will say this though the freshness or perception in freshness is all in how the food is prepped. I could make a salad that would keep 1-2 days in the frig based on how my parents taught me to make it. The same salad would last 2 days longer if I prepped it correctly using a sharp knife and ice water. Two more days of freshness where it could sit in the frig without customers precieving it was old. The problem you run into with some Kroger, Safeway and other outlets is they buy their food from a wholesaler and then it is shipped via warehouse to their warehouse for distribution to the super market. That added transit time reduces the freshness by at least a week. Amtrak if it doesn’t already should buy direct from the wholesaler and prep ASAP afterwards or it’s contractor should. I would not try to remarket a Kroger or Safeway prepared meal on an Amtrak train because it woul
I would be willing to bet that the railroads in the 1960’s obtained their box lunches from railroad or formerly railroad owned hotels whereas Amtrak attempts the purchase from a vendor that exclusively deals in box meals. All the large Canadian Pacific Hotels in Canada (now Fairmont brand hotels) offered box meals to their guests on hikes, to tour busses, to walk-ins. Willing to bet they did the same for CPR trains if needed in a pinch. They still offer the box lunches under the Fairmont name…at least the former CPR Hotels in the Rockies do.
The Fairmont Hotel Boxed lunch from the Fairmont Lake Louise or the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel are awesome, served as lunch on the Rocky Mountaineer Motor Coach option through the Ice Fields parkway.
Probably true but then adjusted for inflation they charged a higher price per meal than Amtrak does today for a good portion of their meal offerings AND their losses were not as great as Amtrak losses.
Also, I will add…just because a service performed in the past with old methods and old technology lost money. Does not necessarily mean that the same service with a much updated management approach cannot break even or at least manage a slim profit. Drop the dining car and serve at your seat is a good idea as it eliminates the dining car expenses BUT then you are faced with the issue of where to prepare hot meals and store unprepped food.
Amtrak carries a lot of underutilized space on a lot of underutilized cars consider…
Baggage Car - one level
Lounge Car - two levels
Dining Car - two levels
Additionally to the above, they place the cars in the train where the space will be wasted even more. Hey why not place food storage in the baggage cars and couple the lounge car behind it? Why not have a baggage / kitchen combo car with it’s own auxillary power source apart from the locomotive? Couple the Lounge behind that then the coaches and last the sleepers. Eliminate the dining car completely. Keep the deliver meals to your sleeping car compartment for those that do not want to traverse via coach
Or better yet, why not have the baggage car midtrain with the ability to traverse through the car for passengers and crew and still have it combo baggage/kitchen car??? Then you have the flexibility to couple the Lounge car before or after the baggage car and/or sleepe
From my experience, you would lose your bet. The box meals that I bought were provided in places such as Hendersonville, N.C., Dothan and Piedmont?, Ala., and Abbeville or Greenwood in S.C. I do not know if the restaurant in the station in Dothan had any real connection with the ACL or was simply a tenant.
Other railroads may have had an arrangement such as you suggest.
Suspect that a combination of good prep rules and good training (perhaps a mixture of central-facility and on-site) would result in a great many restaurants or catering services (including those in places like Kroger) being able to provide good quality at the necessary timing and scale. Much of that would hinge on enforcing quality procedures without exception to ensure the providers ‘get it’. It is not rocket science to teach that you don’t use a metal knife to cut salad greens, for example, but it does have to be taught to most people who are only ordinarily trained, and it does have to be done consistently with no little mistakes when a new hire “forgets”.