Saturday, May 10. This morning’s New York Times reports the demise of a railroad tradition: The bar car. The last bar car in the nation which runs on Metro North’s New Haven line is a thing of the past. It has aged out of the system and it will not be replaced.
Back in the 70’s when I started riding Conrail’s Port Jervis line (now operated by New Jersey Transit) bar cars were standard. They sold coffee and rolls in the morning and beer, wine and liquor in the afternoon. Soon after it took over the service NJT reported bar cars were money losers and besides they needed the space for seats. That was certainly true; last minute riders always wound up standing for several stations. But commuters are a resourceful lot and Hoboken Terminal had and still has a shop where you can buy drinks to go. It is a popular place; it is common to see riders enjoy a drink with their journey home.
So good bye to the bar car. Some of us will miss you. But we will get on with our lives as we remember the trains of yesteryear.
The concept of the bar/lounge or galley/bar seems to fall somewhere between rare and non-existent when you get beyond metropolitan New York/New Jersey. Unless you have a really long ride, I’ve never been able to see who has the time to knock back a stiff one on the ride home. Social mores have also changed since the “Mad Men” era and the three-martini lunch and commuter bar cars are not as tolerated as they used to be.
On one of our Ridewithmehenry trips we watched on a hot summer day a couple of guys consume a six pack of beer each between Hoboken and Port Jervis. Some guys do drink more than others. And cheaper today is the pint bottle from a store sometimes grabbing a couple of bottles or cans of ginger ale or club soda from the platform or concourse vendors.
Way back when it was Conrail? Some of us old timers remember when it was Erie and continued up through Callicoon, Hancock, Binghamton, Etc. I still have friends who live not far from Port Jervis.
You might end up being pun-ished for that one… [swg]
Our wine and beer tasting trains are phenomenally popular - and many folks just pass up the tasting part and go straight to the bottles of beer and wine…
The NY Times article was a fine tribute to a passing institution.
I started riding between GCT/NYP and New Haven in 1968 and I was thrilled to see bar cars, of which we in Ohio knew nothing. I was 20 and there was a real adult atmosphere in the bar car, reminiscent of the Tonight Show. I never saw teenagers or even 20-somethings; this was the province of men in suits who lived on the Connecticut Gold Coast. The New Haven, and then Penn Central used the traditional Budd-built postwar cars, so the bar was a small but dignified business stand; there were no microwaves in evidence yet.
I observed that some men seemed to spend nearly the whole ride home to Greenwich or Cos Cob, etc. standing and drinking. When they got off the train they nearly all got into a waiting and wife-driven wood paneled station wagon and drove home, where I guess they had a drink or two before dinner. As the son of a factory foreman this was a lifestyle I had only read about.
On morning rides into Manhattan I observed that in a full coach I was about the only person to be looking out the window. I guess they had seen the scenery often enough; they instead had their briefcases on their laps and were busy at work. Living on the Gold Coast came at the price of hard work, I thought.
So much has changed; I’m surprised bar cars have lasted this long in this health-conscious, thou-shalt-not age.
The New Haven, then PC, and later Amtrak also ran pa
I was raised a few hundred feet from the 4 track NYNH&H “Boulevard of Steel” where most of my little friends fathers were commuters into NYC, leaving Old Greenwich on the 8:05 and returning on the 5:05 out of Grand Central. There was always a bar car on the evening train and way back when, it seems to me that there was an extremely heavy and very old monster of a bar car which served the evening train to Westport --the home of “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” I rode a parlor car on the NH only once, it was grand. Usually, I rode “The Gilt Edge” leaving Boston at 4 pm with a full dinning car where I always had baked Boston Scrod & baked beans. In those pre credit card days, I had a NH charge card which allowed me to be billed monthly for my travel and meals. Lots of “memories of trains.”
The era of the bar car… Simpler times? One could say that for sure. Better times? A matter of opinion…but I say YES! My very earliest memories of riding trains was on the NYC Harlem line up to Bronxville, Tuckahoe, Pleasantville, et. al. The comparison noted above to The Tonight Show seems to be very appropriate from my memories.
John Kneiling would view this as a ‘dumbing down’ to the ‘least common denominator’, and especially a lost opportunity to make some revenue from a captive market.
Perhaps - depends on something like coach revenue (seating capacity/ density per car x average ticket revenue), vs. the tradeoff in the bar car revenue [ (average ticket revenue + average profit from bar sales per person) x less persons ] - i.e., does the added bar car revenue make up for the loss in capacity ?
Wonder if a bar car could be added to the consists as a private club car, as a “For Members Only” type of thing ?
Paul, the NH had, over the years, a number of “club cars” for paying members only. I believe the New Canaan Branch had one and possibly the Danbury Branch. I do know that I never was a member.
The New York Central had some private club cars also. The last one that lasted into Metro North operations was a 1000-series postWWII “AC-MU” that could mu with the 1100’s that were still in service on the Hudson line. When they were phased out with M-1’s and M-3’s providing all mu service, its usefulness ended. The LIRR had regular parlor car service with standard PRR heavyweight parlors replaced by second-hand lightweight lounge, lounge-cafe, and lounge-sleeper cars. Even some of the postwar mu’s converted to trailers behind diesels were configured as parlor cars.
The C&NW ran some private club cars with bar on a few commuter runs. I recall riding one at age 28 with a colleague who was a member (he lived in the swanky old money North Shore suburb of Lake Forest) in the evening. Quite pleasant! I think it continued well into the Metra days.