Thanks for that photo. I have never been in one of those rebuilds, and until now, have never even known of their existence. JMHO, they are very nice, but I think I'd prefer them in their original decor, partly for their heritage design, but also because each road used different and distinctive decor...
Unfortunately, the original decor was gone from them long time back during some refurbishment or the other. By the time they got HEP-ed most were already pretty bland.
There were decent fakes on the all the tables of the Empire Builder last week. It was nice to have some kind of nicety. They were not present on the Lake Shore Limited though.
For a while. But by the time the Diner fleet came down to 20 or so, they were pretty bland and uniform. There were either Temoinsa or non-Temoinsa. There may have been a stray fixture here or there, but they were not really maintained. Actually there came a point when they simply stopped maintaining them, and finally as they came up for major repairs or had major failures, they were taken off line and Diners were simply removed from trains. Both the LSL and the Star were victims of this phenomenon before the VL-IIs started arriving.
Whenever anyone compares Amtrak dining cars to anything else someone says “apples to oranges” - as if serving food on an Amtrak train exists in some alternate universe.
Too late. She already hired me as her attorney. I'm asking for everything you have - but you can keep the flowers. She didn't like those artificial ones you gave her nor the ones you stole from the neighbor's yard because they always blamed her for stealing them.
Not all forum members are American. I’ll meet you in the Conductors Van and see if we can convince the driver to let us ride on the foot plate!
Room service is still available as it's always been if someone is not comfortable with communal dining. It would be impossible to give everyone service in the dining car without having communal dining, there simply aren't enough tables.
I know. But they managed through the pandemic without community seating. The diner remains off limits to coach passengers, too. I am suggesting that they retain limited, socially distanced diner seating, that is the current practice, until we are further into the pandemic recovery and people are again more accustomed to closer quarters. Timing it to the lifting of mask requirements makes the most sense to me.
A superliner has 18 tables. A superliner sleeper has 20 rooms that are sold. So a train with 2 sleepers could easily accommodate private parties at tables.
Yes that it, however at this fair they called them draisine. Which if you dig deep is a form of a handcart, but at some point one is hand powered the other has a motor.
Side note I am head to Texas this weekend. Have to ride coach to St Louis from Chicago to pick up my roomette to Texas. So some passenger are spending big money to avoid other people it would seem. I am not ready to eat at a table myself, but think that coach passenger should have that choice.
Oh I agree. Whenever I would ride in coach I would usually eat in the diner so I agree that it should be offered.
I was really expecting that coach access to the diner would be restored with community seating.
I agree. I worry that even for sleeper passengers the expectation will be to pre-order meals a week before your trip. That’s not the dining car experience to me but we take what we get (and if it’s better than flex I guess we can be thankful!).
Agreed. Some trains had two full diner's...one for coach passenger's, and one for Pullman. Other trains had a choice between a diner and a lunch counter type car. In those cases, both were open to all passenger's. And there were some all-coach streamliner's that had diner's, as well. Barring coach passenger's from the diner's is an Amtrak phenomenon, and fairly recent, at that...
The one instance I can think of where coach passengers were barred was the Super Chief/El Capitan which Santa Fe treated as two separate trains that happened to be coupled together. El Cap passengers were strictly barred from the Super Chief section, but the El Cap had its own full diner as well as the Kachina Coffee Shop on the lower level of the lounge car.
As I mentioned in another posting the better long-distance trains offered an economy diner for coach passengers, usually inserted in the consist where it would be a shorter walk than going back to the full-service diner. Passengers chose which they preferred.
That was one example. The two formerly separate trains were combined due to a downturn in business from around 1968 until Amtrak day, except for peak season and holiday periods where they were separated into sections.
In early Amtrak days the lunch counters still turned up. I ate in the Ranch car on the Empire Builder in September 1971. The Coast Starlight of course was an immediate success that swamped the diner. When Amtrak developed some management in LA they found that they had surplus Santa Fe counter-lounges that had run on trains like the Missionary, so they put them into the Starlight. They were a big hit but I was warned not to write about it because they hadn't gotten permission from DC.
When the AutoTrain still fed Coach Passengers,they had their own Diner, as did the Sleeper Passengers.
