Dining at speed

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DINING AT SPEED By Chris De Winter Hebron
	Introduction This book is intended to fill a gap in the literature on on-train dining: there has been no British book since 1986, and no book has previously treated it from the standpoint of the social history of ideas. Doing so reveals a complex and exciting interaction between people as different as Brunel, Pullman and Charles Darwin and ideas of quality, democracy and comfort. It also springs from the author’s own experiences of comfortable and stylish railway travel, from the 1947 Devon Belle to the 1990 Tauern Express, including train D.225 (the successor to the old working Orient Express), and the Mitropa-run 0.717 Hook to Berlin service, many of which are described
Chapter One: The Idea and its Origins	Chapter Two: Why Did it Take so Long?	Chapter Three: “Dining at Speed” Finally Arrives – But Why Did it Happen When it Did?	Chapter Four: The Idea Catches On: Dining at Speed in the ‘Golden Age’ of Railways, 1880-1914

Dining at Speed” on railway journeys is more than just a set of events – it constitutes a particular ‘idea’, in the sense of a shared belief about the way things are, or can be, with elements of considerable glamour and fascination in the minds of its believers – a view of travelling comfort that some have since called ‘train magic’. This first chapter shows that these beliefs have all the formal characteristics of a historical idea – currency both at the time and since, influence on and connections with other ideas, and explanatory power. It also shows that the earliest expressions of the idea, in both UK and USA, lie very far back – long before the actual dining car was invented, and in at least two cases – Benjamin Dearborn in USA and Isambard Kingdom Brunel in Britain – at the very birth of public railways themselves. The first question we need to answer, therefore, is why the idea took so long to become a reality.	Using a wide range of contemporary sources, from Punch and the correspondence of Charles Darwin to the novels of Dickens and Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, as well as more conventional railway material, this chapter demonstrates that the reason for the delay was not one of technology. Instead, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the crowded and chaotic ‘refreshment stops’ of the early railways, there was a whole range of economic and social factors that came together to work against the provision of on-train dining services during the earlier part of the Victorian period. People found the new mode of travel – especially its speed – alarming and stressful; it was believed (not without reason) that railways and railway journeys were dangerous. Early railway financial structures meant that the companies found providing services that cost space and train weight problematic. Also, the ‘refreshment stop’ paradigm, which had worked well in the world of the stage-coach, was one that travellers understood and were used to, and they were loath to give it up despite its unsuitability for whole trainloads at a time. And perhaps most of all, during the middle years of the 19th Century, the main meal likely to be needed – lunch – was unfashionable, ‘feminised’, almost immoral in the eyes of men of affairs. The chapter shows how all these attitudes worked together to reinforce each other, until things gradually began to change from the middle 1860s onwards with the coming of a generation for whom railways were a norm rather than a novelty	On-train dining makes its debut in 1867 in UISA and in 1879 in Britain. Three factors came together during this period to help bring this about. The first was a change in eating habits, with breakfast becoming ever earlier, dinner ever later, and lunch now finally becoming respectable to fill the space in between. The second was an increasing emphasis on comfort, and the third was a growing need by the railway companies to consolidate passenger travel market share, by offering competitive inducements to the traveller (especially in business) to use their lines rather than their rivals’. In turn, four major innovators responded to these changes -- Pullman and Villard in USA, Allport in UK, and Nagelmackers in mainland Europe. After demonstrating the changes in attitude listed above, this chapter first describes Pullman’s development of day and sleeping cars, closely followed by diners, in USA. Then it moves to Britain, describing (after a brief discussion of the development of ‘luncheon baskets’ for sale to travellers begun by Spiers and Pond) how Allport on the Midland Railway engineered a travel comfort revolution and brought Pullman to Britain, but had his thunder stolen by Oakley of the rival Great Northern with the first British dining car, the famous Prince of Wales. We then return to USA to see how Henry Villard, in a competitive situation very similar to the Midland’s, introduced dining cars on the newly opened Northern Pacific – the first US transcontinental railroad to do so. The chapter ends with a brief look at Nagelmackers’ early work on the London Chatham and Dover.	This chapter looks at the spread of dining car services during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in Britain, continental Europe, and the USA. The initial ‘war’ between the Midland and the GNR had led both companies to pioneer travel comfort, including dining cars between London and the northern industrial cities. Other companies, starting with the LNWR, found themselves compelled to follow suit, in a sort of ‘domino effect’ – first the LNWR to northern cities, then both the West Coast and the East Coast Anglo-Scottish services (the Flying Scotsman got its diner in 1900) – then the Great Western, and so on. Using historical records including food reviews, dining carriage diagrams and preserved menus, this chapter looks at each area in turn, then moving to examine the newly-competing Great Central (inventor of the buffet car) and the growth of Pullman influence on the Brighton and Metropolitan lines. The chapter next describes the development of international European dining services by Georges Nagelmackers, the founder of Wagons-Lits, most famous of course for the Orient Express, with an emphasis on outright luxury and finest haute cuisine – King Edward VII even tried to ‘poach’ the Orient’s chef from him (unsuccessfully). Finally, in USA once more, we look through the medium of menus and other records from three case-study railroads – the Santa Fé, the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Northern Pacific -- at the development of a specially ‘American’ style of dining with the emphasis on increasingly wide à la carte choice, ending with a brief look at possibly the world’s first ‘super-train’, the Santa Fé De Luxe.
Chapters 5 - 8
Chapter Five: Depression and Democratisation – Competition and Luxury: On-Train Dining between 1919 and 1939	Chapter Six: Austerity, Bureaucracy and Passenger Attrition: The Idea in Decline, 1939-1977	Chapter Seven: “Cenator Redivivius”: The Revival of the Idea, 1977-1997	Chapter Eight: Privatisation and After – Has the Idea Run its Course?
As the chapter title suggests, the years between the two world wars were characterised by two forces pulling in opposite directions – a need by the railways to retain custom during the depression and a need to compete for what luxury travel market still remained. This chapter looks at the various strategies adopted by railway companies in Britain, mainland Europe and USA to pursue the two objectives, and especially at the way dining and other on-train refreshment services – buffet cars for example – were used to further these ends. To meet the depression challenge for economy, third (in USA ‘chair’) class seats and dining car places were increased; posters and other advertising urged people to travel, and when travelling to use the dining car; meal costs were capped by simplifying menus (or in USA, reducing the range of choice), though the savings weren’t always passed on to the customers; in Britain the buffet, and in USA the ‘coffee shop’ or ’tavern’ car, offered simpler and cheaper alternatives to the formal meals that had previously held sway, with huge savings in staff costs. Buffet service also made possible the weight savings needed by the new high-speed diesels such as the Fliegende Hamburger and the Burlington Zephyrs. Each of these developments is detailed in a separate section, again quoting carriage designs and historic menus. At the other end of the income scale, further sections chronicle Wagons-Lits expansion of the Orient Express into a whole suite of trains, the coming of Mitropa with its flagship Rheingold express, the development of Pullman services and named trains in Britain (some, like the Irish Mail, serving very fine food indeed) and the LNER and LMS East Coast and West Coast streamliners, with special attention paid to the catering innovations on these luxury ‘streaks’ A final section looks at three North American ‘supertrains’ – the North Coast Limited of the Northern Pacific and the Chesapeake and Ohio’s two most famous and successful trains, the George Washington (America’s first completely air-conditioned train) and the Sportsman.	This chapter looks at the effect on dining services of the privations of World War II and, in Britain, the austerity period that followed it – a period in which continuing restrictions were exacerbated by the bureaucracy accompanying nationalisation. Shortages were complicated by real changes in customer demand, arising from a range of causes, and the newly formed BR Hotels Executive under E.K. Portman-Dixon tried a wide range of design experiments – including Oliver Bulleid’s notorious ‘tavern cars’, discussed here in some detail, -- to find a solution to the problems this raised. The problem however was that once austerity lightened somewhat, road competition (and in USA air competition) took over as ‘enemies’ of on-train dining services. Patronage fell along with customer numbers, prices increased, and eventually quality suffered severely – as indeed it did in other aspects of the railway system. Typical results were the demise of British Pullmans and European ‘trains de luxe’, and these are examined in some detail, focussing on the menus for the Brighton Belle and the Golden Arrow, and the fate of the ‘working’ Orient Express. But at the same time, market research uncovered a relatively new niche market – businessmen who preferred travel by rail if it was fast enough because they could work on train and also did not have to stop driving to eat. Going after this market led to a complete rethink of the ‘dining at speed’ concept – it became much more utilitarian, much less luxurious, and led to such innovations as the Blue Pullmans and the Trans-Europ Expresses, whose catering is again examined. The final section of the chapter, examining US developments, however demonstrates the near-meltdown of dining and indeed all passenger services that preceded the formation of Amtrak in a country where geography and rail-track standards both meant that direct competition with airlines for this niche market business traffic was almost impossible	The development of business-oriented niche markets in Britain and mainland Europe was paralleled by technological developments and changes in organisational structure – the HST 125s, the TGVs, the formation of InterCity as a profit-making organisation, and the development of microwave and cook-chill culinary technology, which has revolutionised the range of food possible to on-train chefs and menu writers. The initial effect of these changes was to reinvigorate the idea of on-train dining, in its new, more business-oriented mode, and during the 20 years leading up to privatisation there was almost a new ‘golden age’ of on-train dining, though increasingly more restricted to first class travel than it had been since 1915. Separate sections of this chapter look at the development of InterCity as a business, the move from on-train cooking to cook-chill provision – supported again by evidence from historic menus -- and the parallel development of ‘Travellers Fare’ into ‘On Board Services’ (the immediate ancestor of today’s Rail Gourmet). A separate section chronicles US developments post the formation of Amtrak, using a menu-evidenced case study of the catering provision for the South West (formerly Super) Chief, to demonstrate the ups and downs of service quality over this period.	In 1996/97 the UK rail network was privatised: the relatively monolithic InterCity was replaced by a range of train operating companies, with On Board Services split between the actual on-board catering (which usually became the responsibility of the TOCs) and the culinary design, shorebase, procurement and logistics, which became the responsibility of Rail Gourmet. This chapter looks at the effect of this on on-train catering, and examines pointers to future development. The TOCs who offered catering fell into two groups – those providing conventional dining (Anglia, First Great Western and GNER), and those providing at-seat service in First Class (Eurostar, Midland Mainline and Virgin Trains). Sections describe the services provided by each group, using material from menus, interviews with catering management, and ‘mystery customer’ field research, and outline current plans for future development where these are known. Separate sections then deal with mainland European developments – the French TGVs, the German ICEs and the Spanish offers of Rail Gourmet España – and the most recent US developments including both the increased ridership following the 9/11 atrocity, the Bush budget cuts, and the coming of the 150 mph Washington-Boston Acela Express. All suggest the idea of ‘dining at speed’ has not yet run its course, but diversity of offer will continue to increase.