Other trains affected by the Oct. 1 changeover are the City of New Orleans and Cardinal, which today offer sit-down meals to both coach and sleeper passengers in a separate dining area, but the limited menu is pre-prepared and heated on board.
The service model is similar to the one utilized on the Capitol and Lake Shore: sleeping car travelers’ meals and one alcoholic beverage are included in the ticket price, while coach passenger access and dining options are limited to what’s available in each train’s cafe car.
But at a presentation and tasting for the media on Washington Union Station’s Track 30 aboard Viewliner II diner Tallahassee last Friday, Vice President, Product Development and Customer Experience Peter Wilander and Executive Chef David Gottlieb outlined how they believe the new menu would improve mealtime for all six trains.
For presentation the balsawood box and green bags are out, replaced by a tray holding the main dish and a salad. “The box itself had an unanticipated consequence of service degradation,” admits Wilander, who displayed examples of the old and new packaging and food items next to each other. As for the trays, “We’re starting with an off-the-shelf design that will allow us to progress to the next iteration (creating) our own molds to do something different,” he says. Unlike the boxes and their contents which generated mountains of trash despite being touted as a “sustainable choice,” the new trays are washable and reusable.
Unlike their predecessors, the main dishes are prepared in new vendor New Horizon Foods Inc. kitchens and flash frozen, which enables them to be heated in a convection oven. Gottlieb tells Trains News Wire, “There was a lot of back and forth in a competition with three or four vendors, and we tested everything in our test kitchens” at Amtrak’s Consolidated National Operation Center in Wilmington, Del.
Similar to the choices rolled out on the Capitol and Lake Shore, the new menu includes braised beef in a red wine sauce, chicken fettuccine, and a vegan Asian noodle bowl. Added are a Creole shrimp and Andouille sausage casserole and a pasta and meatballs “kids meal.” There are no cold options but all hot dishes come with a side salad and a dessert brownie.
A big plus is the fact that the Cardinal finally gets a Viewliner II diner, even if only passengers lucky enough to book the train’s single sleeping car are able to use it. One Viewliner sleeper remains out of service from the Cayce, S.C., Silver Star accident, according to Roger Harris, Amtrak’s EVP, Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer, and this has precluded operating a second sleeper in each of the Cardinal’s two consists.
The food is obviously designed to mix together in one bowl, precluding any serving of individually-cooked steak, chicken, or fish with separate side dish vegetable and salad dressing options. Amtrak briefly tried similar “pre-plating” as an economy move on the City of New Orleans in the mid-2000s but the experiment was quickly dropped when customers complained about the lack of choice.
Another significant drawback is that on the Cardinal, Meteor, Crescent, and southbound City, the identical menu is offered at both lunch and dinner. Breakfast is essentially unchanged from the Lake Shore-Capitol model: a continental breakfast with one hot egg, ham, and cheese sandwich option.
Depending upon trip length, the same meal may also repeat – southbound dinner and northbound breakfast on the Meteor and Crescent, and eastbound dinner and westbound breakfast on the Cardinal. Connect between any of these trains at Washington or New York, and Midwest-Florida travelers double the repetition. Overnight trains’ cafe cars are to be stocked with some of the fresh sandwich options available on the Midwest, Northeast, and California corridors, but those need to be purchased separately.
I will find out this summer when friends and I take our annual railfan trip to PA and will be riding Pennsylvanian and Cardinal. I did travel on CZ, Eagle and SW Chief this past summer, my first LD trips by coach and we had the same meals in diner that first class had, just had to pay for them. But it was good food, and we enjoyed the experience. When I take CONO, I do a roomette, and the meals were not that great, not like I heard they used to be. Did not like the sandwich, always took off the fatty meat and kept salami and cheese, which was OK. So these new meals might be an improvement on that. Wait and see. Parents and I always ate in diner only place to get food, and we had the same meals as anyone else, Pullman had to pay for meals too, we might have to wait a little longer to be seated if they were waiting, but all worked out OK. Only time I was ever shut out of a diner was on CN Super Continental. Steward took our dinner reservation at Vancouver station and when time came, I wondered why no one announced first seating. No PA system in those days, someone from diner would come thru the cars. We showed up and he said we were a little late and I said no one told us, he asked where we were sitting, and I said Daynighter coach, kinda like Amtrak business class, He said diner only for sleepers and was embarassed by his mistake, told us there was a cafe car for us to use. Like Amtrak has today, I wrote CN a letter upon return and said US railroads never discriminated. They did reply and apologize for confusion but it was their policy.
I wonder why Amtrak never invite European railroad officials to the US and gave them free hand to evaluate how US and Amtrak operate from top to bottom, or people from JR Rail in Japan, these folks for example have been in the HSR and PTC passenger service since 1964, even If Amtrak never uses their ideas, at least they’d have a better understanding of their operations.
The only private railroad that made money on their dining service was the New Haven, which had bar cars on their commuter trains.
All the others LOST money on their dining service. Dining service was considered a loss-leader item; people would patronize one railroad over another serving the same two cities based on the dining service.
AMTRAK is now asked to do what the private, for profit railroads, could never do.
There are no Viewliner II’s in service yet . Only bag and diners.
Maybe there is hope; the items pictured look pretty good and very good compared to the green bag food in a box first offered. Wonder what all those green bags cost Amtrak.
My wife and I recently flew from London to Chicago business class on Amtrak’s current chief’s former airline United.
The service in Business class was great from the greeting pre flight drink to the hot towel and amenities bag and very decent food variety and quality.
Us Amtrak suporters and it is hard to be one in Tulsa certainly feel like we are in a never ending Peanuts Cartoon.
Higher speed rail such as Chicago-Saint Louis starts with a bang with new rail and concrete ties then never grows up because of PTC problems; then the single level trains finally get spanking new Viewliner diners only to start out with the green bag joke and brand new diners stored. Then the cars for midwest and California service that the maker of Metra bi levels cannot figure out a way to pass the stress tests.
Every time Lucy shows a brand new football we run up and of course she pulls it up again and we lay on our backs thinking so close this time; maybe next time. Sigh.
It has ben proven that people will not pay more for food during transportation. What counts for the vast majority of passengers is not food but price. I know people who will change planes twice just to save $10. If Amtrak was to include say another $50 dollars to the price of a coach ticket to cover the cost of meals people would abandon Amtrak in droves for the cheaper option of flying and they would get to their destination in hours rather than days in the bargain. Good service costs money and people said they did not want to pay for good service so the airlines responded by cutting fares which resulted in less service. And travelers still flock to the airlines and highways. They pack into small seats and sit three abreast. And while they complain, there has been no rush to patronize Amtrak except in the corridors, particularly the NEC where short distances make Amtrak competitive with air for frequency and time.
Also, not allowing coach passengers in the diners means that there can be fewer personnel to staff the car. The unions killed the dining cars with outsize wage demands. Labor is the largest cost in the operation of the diners so if you have to hire more personnel to serve the coach passengers then you are farther away from breaking even which will be required by law soon. As someone pointed out, it was Congress that decreed the end of food service losses. Who knows what would happen if that requirement is not met. All diners might totally disappear and then you will be riding with only a café car for nourishment. Amtrak carries only 1/2 of 1% of intercity travelers. That is “bug dust” in the total scheme of intercity travelers. Your Congressional representatives don’t care unless it affects their reelection possibilities and the few LD passengers and railfans who do care about food service aren’t much of a voice.
I agree with the poster who said that Graham Claytor wouldn’t have run trains like Amtrak does. A true statement but Claytor’s trains were his to run as he and his stockholders wanted to run them. This is a different day and age. Government run things now. A government that makes laws that they expect to be complied with. The already overburdened taxpayers should not be expected to pick-up the tab for someone else’s meals while they enjoy their vacations.
After all this time and expense to replace the original diners which which had remained in service far longer than ever expected and still served an acceptable product, You are doing everything possible to prevent the new diners from being used as intended. WHAT A WASTE. The march toward airline food continues. And we all know what happened to airline food in the USA…It has disappeared. Proof positive that an airline executive is no railroad man.
Now, Amtrak has to stop the lousy practice of closing the cafe car an hour or two before arrival for “inventory”…
Gerald – you have it. Can’t sell food to coach passengers in the diner if there is no way to collect the money. Pre-paying would be the way. In NZ, you can purchase your food when you buy your ticket. They don’t guarantee they won’t run out of food en route if you don’t.
Could I change the focus for a moment? Just read Bob Johnston’s story again. Are you going to tell me that every single Viewliner sleeper, including all the Viewliner II’s, is assigned, so that two can’t be scraped up for the Cardinal? Maybe you are, in fact, going to tell me that. Have all the Viewliner II’s been delivered yet? Maybe that’s the choke point. Will someone please comment?
The Alaska Railroad manages to have cafe and table service on most of their passenger trains. Food service is available from before the departure city (I’ve been seated in the dining car before departure, and enjoyed a decent meal as the train departed a terminal city more than once). And food service continues right up to the end of the line. I know this not the same as an Amtrak long distance, and it is jot perfect, but it is tried and true.
As with sleeper passengers that pay for their meals with their tickets the same can be done for coach passengers, that would eliminate waste in food service. However, we all know that people will pay for good food, doesn’t matter where it comes from, the same applies to travel, people are willing to pay for good food, they don’t pay for crap food(which most airline food still is, there’s a reason that Swiss Air still employs chefs to make their food).
Passengers would be willing to pay for good food cooked on the train, and the simplest way to prevent waste is to have the passengers pre-order their meals when booking their tickets. When booking you get a menu that lists all of the available food, you order what you want for which ever meal you want to eat…the food is loaded on the diner(it’s labeled for each passenger) and the onboard chef cooks it for the appropriate meal. The same concept could apply to both sleeping and coach passengers.
Everybody should keep in mind that it was Congress, not Amtrak, which instituted the decree that Amtrak’s food offerings should at least break even. What we’re seeing is Amtrak’s attempts to make the service pay, after Congress figured out that it was a money drag on the company.
So they have two options: experiment and figure out what may actually work long-term, or just give up and scrap the dining cars and perhaps the cafe cars, too. It’s the law soon, after all.
I do believe that Amtrak should at least break even on dining options. It doesn’t make much sense for it to lose money in a business that typically earns it, although I do allow some weight to be placed on the “but it helps sell tickets” argument. However, that needs to be quantified. Otherwise what good is the extra revenue if the sale is a net loss?
It almost certainly makes sense for Amtrak to shift to the airline-style pre-prepared meals. Technology has come quite a long way in the last decade or so in that department, and with flights regularly exceeding 15 hours these days, there are plenty of options to keep food which has been prepared fresh for a good long time. Plus, there are companies and the infrastructure to make it happen available, especially in airline hub cities like Chicago, Portland, Atlanta or Washington.
They do need to figure out how to work coach in better. Excluding them from the dining car is kinda crappy. Many ride the long-distance trains only part of the distance. If I’m riding the #5 from Chicago to Omaha, or the #3 from Chicago to Kansas City, I’m going to want dinner since the train leaves mid-afternoon and arrives late in the evening, once most restaurants are closed and long after I’m going to be famished.
But at least they are trying.
I’ve experienced the new dining service on the Capitol. It SUCKS. As for the coach passengers, when there was a full diner, many came to eat breakfast in the dining car and pay whatever the meal costs. Now, they no longer have this privilege.
AMTRAK, bring back the dining car and stop trying to destroy what is attractive to the long distance traveler.
While they know how many sleeper passengers they will have, and can plan meals accordingly, they don’t know how many coach passengers would opt for meals in the dinner, so maybe they took away the option to simplify provisioning.
I enjoyed fine dining in the diners of many railroads before anyone could evern imagine something like an Amtrak. But, I’m wiling try the “new” dining service with an open mind..
Trouble is I don’t really have any long trips planned in the near future. If Amtrak wants to pull this offf right they will have to have the food properly heated and have well trained servers. I’am sure there wI’ll much feedback on these pages before my first sampling of the new service.
Frankly I completely fail to understand the exclusion of coach passengers from the diner. My LD trips (long ago) were mostly coach and I always ate a meal.
What’s the point of a diner if most of the passengers won’ty patronize it?
Good story; however, wrong choice of words, as it should be: “DEVOLVING Menu on Closing Tap…”
No surprise, as Amtrak continues to evidence the end result of inappropriately experienced management with no real background in railroads, or, how to benchmark to other passenger rail operations. This lack of expertise is compounded by the reality of a Board of Directors deficient in relevant experience to provide meaningful stewardship.
Blow away the fog to see how this is yet another lame effort by Amtrak leadership to devolve the national network by cutting a piece off at a time of any semblance of acceptable on-board services for the long distance trains. How much revenues did Amtrak lose as compared to any cost savings when diners were cut for boxed MREs on the “Capitol Limited” and “Lake Shore Limited”? How will son of Contemporary Meals, Flexible Dining, continue to erode sleeper revenues to support Amtrak’s contention that those trains are dying?
The undefined reversal to allow coach passengers to partake in the chow line is a slap-in-the face to anybody who knows history.
Bottom line: Mr. Claytor would have never run his Amtrak trains like this; whoever pursued this cockamamie concept would be pushing a baggage cart at Washington Union Station.
I intend to have more to say on this spit in the face, which also defies the clear intent of Railpax legislation.
M.E. SINGER
Here is a thought. Have a new price structure that includes dining car meals with your coach ticket.
One dining car for one sleeper? Sound like a real money loser! Airlines are improving their meals while AmTrak seems to be going in the opposite direction.
I’ve enjoyed lunch on the Zephyr between Emeryville and Reno many times and have had many entertaining conversations with other passengers, both Sleeper & Coach, over these meals. The food was usually decent and moderately priced. It added to the good experience of taking the train.
I think that not allowing coach passengers to dine in the dining car has to do with Amtrak’s desire to do away with payment transactions. Meals are included in the cost of the sleeper fare but coach passengers have to pay. Accepting cash is an invitation to fraud by the onboard service employees and also requires additional accounting. Accepting credit cards lessens the incidence of fraud but there is the expense of the merchants fee plus the cost and maintenance of the credit card machines and the accompanying equipment. By eliminating the coach passengers from eating in the diner the café car is the sole place for the acceptance of cash with exception of onboard cash fare payments which in this day are probably very few.
As far as the “new” food is concerned the offerings appear to be better than the previous diner fare which was loaded with fat and sodium and only in rare occasions did it have any quality above a Denny’s meal. I doubt that it will attract me back to Amtrak’s long distance trains but it is a step in the right direction. Now, if they can just uncouple the cost of meals from the sleeper fares.
Sorry. This AMTRAK “improvement” is still a non-starter. Coach passengers are not second class citizens and deserve much better.
I could deal with this if allowed to order pasta with meatballs. Classifying it as a kids meal is an issue for me because this would lead to staff rationing to safe for kids like is sometimes done with current children’s meals. They should be able to add a sandwich imho. All this stuff that is mixed together always includes ingredients that I don’t like.
So, anybody still believe Anderson is trying to kill all the LD trains or Amtrak in general? Please explain!
Same lunch and dinner isn’t a big deal on the Crescent. There are few through passengers at Atlanta, so few eating both lunch and dinner on the train.