ALL THE CHARM OF A HIGH SCHOOL CAFETERIA.

Amtrak have modified their pathetic "Contemporary Dining Experience" (meaning box lunches in arch deluxe boxes) into a few additional hot meal options bundled into a pathetic experience.

What Amtrak is now calling “Contemporary Dining Improvements” includes three hot entrées and “deluxe breakfast choices,” up from one hot-meal choice brought back in July 2018.

Sleeping car customers can now choose the following, with meals delivered to their Bedrooms or Roomettes, “or eaten in their private dining car,” Amtrak said. Lunch and Dinner hot items are Chicken Penne Alfredo, Beef Provencal and Asian Noodle Bowl (there is a chilled item, an Antipasto Plate). Deluxe Continental Breakfast hot items are Oatmeal and a Breakfast Sandwich. (Chilled items are Muffins, Yogurt, Fresh Fruit, Hard-boiled Eggs and Cereals. Customers are also offered unlimited soft beverages, a complimentary serving of beer, wine or a mixed-drink during their trip and an amenity kit, all included in their fares.

You'd think that after a quarter century of businesses attempting to disguise a reduction of offerings as an improvement, people would be wise to it, and yet Amtrak persists.

In its report on the latest food service changes, Trains magazine said it obtained an internal Amtrak company memo outlining the changes.

One sentence in the memo may be illustrative of management’s view of dining car service: “but customers should still bus and clean the tables they have used.”

In other words, food service aboard Amtrak is more akin to a school cafeteria than a sit-down restaurant.

Passengers will even use trays or plates to take their chosen continental breakfast choices to their table or sleeping car room.

This is designed to cut down on waste, including packaging waste and uneaten food. However, passengers will be able to take as many items as they like within reason.

Of course they can also ask their sleeping car attendant to fetch their meal and bring it to the passenger’s room.

That Trains report also notes that for now, coach passengers will not have the opportunity to obtain a reservation and be seated in the dining car, something that was still the practice until that airline gang running Amtrak decided that they could curtain off first class in a more forceful way than is possible on a jet.

Now, although coach passengers still are only allowed to purchase food from the cafe car that operates in the Boston section (no snack or beverage service is available between New York and Albany-Rensselaer, N.Y), a “Deluxe Continental Breakfast” is being offered to sleeping car passengers that includes hot oatmeal and breakfast sandwich options, as well as cold hard boiled eggs, cereal, fresh fruit, yogurt, and muffins.

Perhaps they'll also pay attention to the foolishness of sustainably sourcing balsa wood for those lunch boxes only to have all that packaging thrown away.

On board passenger interviews last year revealed that there was a lot of packaging waste and unwanted food not eaten, especially at breakfast. Instead of being presented altogether in a balsa wood box, some Deluxe Continental Breakfast offerings will be displayed on two tables and others items stocked behind a counter manned by the car’s lead service attendant.

And here the raison d'etre for Amtrak included discontent with automat cars on Southern Pacific (and some Burlington trains) and Buffeteria cars replacing the full dining cars on the Hiawatha.