WHY NOT LET NOODLES & COMPANY PROVISION THE TRAINS?

Last weekend was the Amherst Railway Society train show at the Eastern States fairgrounds outside Springfield.  The last time I was there was twenty years ago, time for a return trip.  Driving or flying?  Of course not.  My first ever train trip included The New England States, and I'm a regular rider of the Chicago to Boston service.

Midwinter can be a risky time to ride trains, particularly if the polar vortex and the lake effect snow are at work from Toledo onward toward Utica.  Last Thursday, though, the running was good, does that mean we are seeing a recession developing with Norfolk Southern not having enough land barges to interfere with Amtrak in the usual manner.  Thus, I think we were waiting for time at Toledo and at Cleveland (my habit on trains is to sleep whenever possible and not pay too much attention to my watch or other cues for the time of day) and likewise arrived at Albany with enough time to have done the kind of switching New York Central used to do there.

Things were not so cheerful in the air.  At my hotel I met a family also in Springfield for the show: they had planned to leave Midway around 4 pm on Friday, and their plane finally got in the air around 1 am Saturday.  Unavailability of incoming equipment at Chicago owing to weather elsewhere.  It's convenient when it works, but the air network doesn't always work.

The winter-season Lake Shore is a bare-bones train: two diesels, baggage car, Boston sleeper, Business Class and cafe car, coach, two New York coaches, table car, two New York sleepers, and a baggage car.  At Albany, the diesels and the Boston cars pull away from the New York cars, and a diesel backs on to lead those cars into Penn Station.  The train staff were making announcements all the way across New York that passengers in coaches not use the seats for luggage stories and that people traveling together sit two to a seat: it was a full train.  As an on-time Lake Shore is a mid-morning departure from Buffalo across the northern tier counties, it does a fair amount of local work.  The counterpart Penn Central trains from just before Amtrak added cars from Toronto and Detroit via St. Thomas, Ontario at Buffalo, where additional coaches might have been available to strengthen the train.

Your tax dollars have paid for these new baggage cars and table cars with a profile, and in the case of the table cars, a window arrangement that matches those of the Viewliner sleepers from thirty years ago.  There are new Viewliner sleepers under construction.  The Amfleet II coaches and the business class Amcafe car have a lower profile.  Passenger loadings in Business appeared to be healthy, perhaps people deciding an easy chair to sleep in overnight is good enough value for money given that the sleeping car fare is much higher, and the food service of a fast casual standard.

I'm using the term "table car" deliberately.  These new Viewliner "diners" have a full kitchen (mostly along for the ride on the eastern routes) and that curved casting at the end gives the impression of an old-style boat-tail observation car (an aesthetic also present in Boston and Maine and Maine Central's restaurant-lounge cars of years ago) but no proper observation or lounge would put cardboard trash boxes there.  The corridor to a sleeping car is open behind.  The only tablecloths in use are for putting away the trays the meals now come on, all that's missing is the Chipotle-style "do not throw the baskets away" notices.

What, though, about the food itself?  Jim "Trains and Travel Loomis" calls it the "Contemporary Dining Scam."  Longtime Amtrak analyst and critic Andrew Selden recently rode the Lake Shore, Springfield to Chicago (there will be a second installment of my posts dealing with my westbound ride) and wrote, not at all favorably, about the gustatory experience, in the trade journal Railway Age.

Amtrak dining car costs have traditionally been covered by a transfer of about 10% of the remarkably high sleeper accommodation charge to the dining car account. Amtrak’s Superliner dining cars can turn a profit on these fares, despite the elevated labor cost, as demonstrated by the short-lived 24-hour diner service years ago on the Sunset Limited, described here recently by Bruce Richardson. But current Amtrak management seems unaware of that history, focused instead on abating costs rather than improving overall financial results. Contemporary Dining therefore is a completely unnecessary initiative.

Management, however, lacking a meaningful or accurate internal cost accounting system or any system at all capable of gauging marginal or incremental costs of particular activities, and compensated with bonuses based in part on achieving “cost reductions,” sees the dining car accounts as a target to be slashed, rather than as a component of an overall travel experience designed to elicit repeat business at amazingly high prices, as cruise lines and airlines do (in First and Business Class). We have noted previously that customers in this segment of Amtrak’s business are its most remunerative, taking into account all of the costs of generating their revenue, as well as representing by far the largest segment of the business. Driving them off with bad service and bad food hardly seems a prudent strategy.

But asking one person to manage the kitchen, meaning zapping the portion-controlled stuff put aboard at Chicago or New York, and maybe taking it to the tables, doesn't do much for the morale of the attendant, the timeliness of the food, or tips.  Here's Mr Selden.

In the new scheme, the customer enters the dining car, eight cars back from the Boston sleeper (or just forward from the two New York sleepers), to find a delightful new CAF USA-built Viewliner dining car with 42 seats and a traditional galley, but staffed by a single employee. Depending on the employee, one may encounter different service schemes. Amtrak’s preference is that customers queue up outside the door to the galley (how customers are supposed to know this isn’t clear, as no instruction is provided), and take turns asking the one employee for the food they want, from a menu taped to the wall. In other cases, the employee may invite the customers to seat themselves at one of the ten and one-half booths (the missing one and one-half booths have been replaced by four cardboard trash bins—a hint of what’s to come), where the employee will take their order.

If ordered at the door, the customer is expected to stand in the rocking and rolling car (thank you, CSX, for the mediocre ride quality) while the employee repairs to the galley to assemble the requested items, possibly microwave some of it, and pack it all into a brown paper bag (the bags don’t fit well on the galley’s serving counter and are awkward to handle), which then is handed to the waiting customer. The customer picks up his own plastic utensils from a nearby table and then … well, is on his own to figure out whether to sit at a booth (if one is open) or wander back to his sleeping car, which might be as much as 650 feet and eight cars removed from the diner. The microwaving will surely have worn off by then. In other cases, the employee may deliver the requested “food” items without the brown paper bag to the customer at his booth.

After eating the “meal,” does the customer bus his own trash (and it’s all trash—nothing is re-usable)? Or is the sole employee expected to clean up, too? Nothing in the car instructs the customer, but to the especially observant, and to the frequent user of fast food establishments, the four cardboard trash bins may be a clue.

Does one tip the employee for this “service”?  We’ll guess that most do not (we did), any more than one tips the counter help at the Burger King.

His train must have been running closer to Christmas, as I only had to negotiate three coaches and the cafe car to the Boston sleeper. Apparently those carriers are re-usable, and one of the cars featured some table tents with the message "Conversation.  Some assembly required."  Apparently if you're one of the passengers who likes the impromptu meetups of the traditional dining car, Amtrak helps you signal that identity.

The food, though? Color Mr Selden unimpressed.

Contemporary Dining is worse, much worse, than its service envelope. There is the food itself. Bet the house that Richard Anderson has never eaten it while under way on the Lake Shore Limited (if he rides his trains at all). What is offered up to the unwitting dinner customer is a five-inch, round black plastic dish of food that can best be characterized as a $4 frozen “TV dinner” that’s been left in the microwave a few seconds too long. It is dry and flavorless, and a bit scorched around the edges. The three-inch side salad is better. Some of the entrée offerings have enough red pepper baked into them as to be inedible to many Americans. The only almost-hot offerings at breakfast are instant oatmeal and an “Egg McMuffin”-like sandwich (hint: it’s better at McDonald’s). A tiny dish of fruit and a cup of yogurt are also available, as are dry cereal boxes like you give your children, and cellophane-wrapped muffins like one sees in an airport. No fast-food chain offers food this unappetizing. It’s like the “free” breakfast at the Budget Inn motel.

What set him off was the andouille-and-shrimp rice bowl "which had so much pepper in it my wife couldn’t finish it."  It was tangy enough that I (grower of hot peppers when the weather is favorable) didn't have to amp it up with the Tabasco the carrier provides.  I suppose that the reusable carrier and the slightly more favorable food to packaging ratio of the current offerings compared with the balsa wood boxes of a year ago count for something.

Because the dining car goes to New York, the Boston sleeping car attendant collects supper orders around mid-day, and the meals are stowed in the cafe car for warming up and distribution around Pittsfield.  This is the vegetarian option.  The carrier can be reused.  Sometimes the rolls, wrapped in foil, have been warmed, and sometimes not.

The logic of this sort of food and a table car for sleeper passengers only escapes me.  Mr Selden, again.

Contemporary Dining is an unnecessary, appalling and disrespectful rejection of the company’s most lucrative passengers. It is something that appears to be designed to drive off First Class passengers, rather than incentivize repeat business. There is absolutely nothing “First Class” in “Contemporary Dining.” In the restaurant industry, this is called “Serving up moose manure and calling it chocolate pudding.”

Apparently, their research discovered that relatively few coach passengers were using the dining car. That would make sense for a dining car offering the surf-'n-turf or steak dinner or other high-end starters and mains. But -- to return to my opening question -- if these modified TV dinners are the future, why not just let Noodles cater the trains, and sell their bowls to coach passengers so inclined?

Meanwhile, the Western trains are still offering coach passengers the opportunity to buy dinner in the diner, and pancakes and sausage at breakfast!

I also regret to inform you that The Milwaukee Road will not be helping speed up the Empire Service.

I have no idea what Wisconsin was doing in East Albany.  An earlier car with that name carried the markers on a Milwaukee Express the day it ran as a second section of the preceding train in order to see how fast a Baltic could roll a train from Chicago to Milwaukee.  The timekeeping on that trip was worthy of The Milwaukee Road.