In the past several years, my experience in diners has been that I am asked to write my name and indicate the space I occupy in a sleeper–the attendant takes my order and marks it on the form.
Yup, that’s what my experience was as well
This is probably not accurate, and it may be your friend misunderstood, or heard this from a Navy person as a joke.
All new recruits for any service are required to take the ASVAB. The different branches have minimum required test scores. Here is more info:
The Army has soldiers. The Marine Corps has Marines! Or Jarheads! Or Leathernecks!
I joined the Marine Corp on June 17, 1957. Some of the members of my recruit platoon had enlisted in the Corps because of the judge. The judge I asked? Yep, join the Marines or go to jail! Not harden criminals mind you! Just youthful misfits.
By the time Sargent Wolf and Sargent Payne got done with them, they probably wished that they had opted for a little time in the slammer. Most of them were gone before boot camp graduation.
I know I wrote dining car orders on the nkp, in early 1964, the NYC and later on PC and in the atsf.
Not to mention teufel hunden
Carl, when I made my first trip to the West Coast (in April of 1971), i took the North Coast Limited, which was, of course, then combined with the Empire Bulider and Afternoon Zephyr as far as St. Paul. I ate lunch in, I believe, a GN diner and dinner in a Burlington diner. The NP diner was put on in St. Paul after the NP train was separated from the others. I do not know if this was the standard practice or if there was an alternation of the NP and GN diners between St. Paul and Chicago (one day GN diner St. Paul to Chicago and back the next day, and NP diner the next day).
Incidentally, I do have the impress
All Wrong: I wondered about this as a college student and then figured it out. It’s purely a safety issue. Due to the dinning car swaying and moving, the waiter could easily A.) stab the customer in the neck with the pencil during a particularly hard jolt and B.) or lose his balance and fall into the customer’s lap [if he’s holding the card with one hand, and writing with the other, the waiter will surly lose his balance. We all use our hands for balance, not writing food orders.]
The reason passengers wrote down what they wanted was to keep everybody honest. There were no cash registers, or any other way to account for orders and sales. Since the passenger wrote down what he wanted, neither the waiter nor the Steward could run up the tab and line their own pockets.
What needs to be considered is that there were many ways to cheat and pilfer while out on the road, and not under the direct supervision of management. This concern was compounded by the opportunity for the crew to work collectively to cheat the system.
It was not a perfect system, but requiring the passenger to write down what they wanted provided a measure of control that would not have existed if everything was done verbally.
Frankly, I always thought of that as one of the charms of rail travel and, with unassigned seating, ocean cruising. I recall only one bad experience (a particularly obnoxious woman seated with us on a cruise ship) and many, many pleasant meals with perfect strangers in dining cars and cruise ships. Of course, the obnoxious woman is the only one I still remember.
In 1917 the US army made all their draftees complete an IQ test one of the first mass exercises of this nature. The results showed that black men from northern states scored higher than white men from southern states. Needless to say the results were suppressed so as not to upset the southern white politicians.
I hadn’t thought about that - first class passengers having meals included in their fare. The dining car staff would have to have some way to verify if the person really was in first class or not.
I think another factor may have just been time. A waiter standing writing down an order - especially with a person who’s slow to decide what they want, or who order something then change it - is a waiter who can’t be bringing people food.
I remember writing it down in Amtrak diners and probably also did it in a Penn Central diner. There are other people on the train that would have had written down information - conductor and engineer would have train orders. Many people that settled the west according to books I have read were illiterate. Are we coming back full circle? Kids today can not read and write. They can read and print. Many cannot even write their own signature.
Also, I might add to what was stated already. The ASVAB (which I took as well) is commonly misrepresented as a intelligence test. It is a placement test NOT an intelligence test. You have a range of jobs in which require various skills and ability to learn. The ASVAB - Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test measures your ability to do specific jobs that each service offers.
Further, yes in the past the military recruited illerate and under educated people but since Vietnam the recruitment has been conditional that they take remedial grade school and high school courses over time to reach the level everyone else that had a HS degree is at.
Now I don’t think they admit people that are marginal anymore as they now require either a HS diploma or GED plus a semester of college. They require a semester of college (accredited instutions only) from the GED holders now because of some fly by night GED firms so they used the semester of college to evaluate if the GED is really worth the paper it is written on. Internally the Army has the BSEP progam (Basic Skills Education Program) for people that score lower on the ASVAB but want a higher score for a different job. They can go through the BSEP program and hence raise their ASVAB score and qualify for the higher rated job. This is how they ensure that nobody that lacks education is stuck down at a specific level and that anyone can move up.
Just wanted to clear that up because some folks think the military is a refuge of dumb people, in
My late father worked for the Pullman company before the war, served in an operating railway battalion in France during the war and rejoined the PC after the war as a conductor. From Chicago, he ran the “name trains” on the UP, GN, SF and RI to Seattle, San Francisco and LA for 30 some years until Amtrak put him out of work. I was lucky enough to begin traveling with my family when I was five to SF and over the course of the next twenty plus years to all of the other cities multiple times.
All of the dining car servers were black with some small exceptions, the dinning car Steward was white and was the manager. I fondly recall getting to fill out my meal card and always figured it was a convience for the staff and an accounting proceedure. The waiter always read it back out loud and made and corrections or changes as needed.When I traveled alone with my father, I got to "pay’ for my meal by sorting the checks into numurical order, as he ate what I ordered giving the head cook a few dollars for the extra meal and sleeping the dining car steward in the Pullmans instead of the domitory car with the crew.
This is a long way to telling you that everyone of the porters and dining car waiters were educated and worldly and enjoyed what they were doing, most were from the south coming to Chicago on the IC and finding what would have been a unique opportunity for a black person in the '50’s/60’s, traveling to top flight cities on a luxury mode of transportation serving, at the time, an upscale white audience who tipped well.
I remember some of the crew on the City of Los Angelos (nothing like breakfast in a dome diner at 90 MPH across Wyoming) actually doing a sort of “show” duing service trading trays as they walked past each other as sort of majic act, some times there was even a little harmony singing. They were great people and it really offered me an insight into understanding the different cultures.
Pretty impressive Woody9. 30 + years riding Pullman’s on fine trains out of Chicago, before and after WWII. Must have seen it all. What a great life.
Its always been my experience that you write your own order on a ticket and the waiter reads it back to you aloud.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Marines are Marines, not soldiers. The Army has soldiers.
For what it’s worth (not much), Navy SEALs refer to them as “candy-ass Marines” in their take on the Marine Hymn.
So far on this trip I have noticed one change in the procedure that I seen followed since Amtrak more or less standarized its fare from train to train–on both the Cardinal and the Crescent,(only one sleeper out of New York yesterday) the attendant asked only that the patrons sign their name–after asking what room was occupied. The stasndard form was used on the Crescent, but, apparently because the Cardinal has different offerings, a different form was used.
Of course, on the trains with the “let us get rid of the passengers” idea, the attendant does it all.
You don’t need to use your hand for balance when walking on a moving train, all you have to do is walk with your feet slightly farther apart than normal, that keeps you balanced as well. Also, if you ever noticed, they sometimes actually lean up against the table with their legs at very imperctible angle to help them stand up. Safety has nothing to do with it at all.