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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A NEWLY DIGITIZED MENU COLLECTION SHOWS OFF AMERICA’S LOST RAILROAD
CUISINE  
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Claire Soon
December 2, 2019
Atlas Obscura [[link removed]]

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_ Once upon a time, Americans riding the rails could choose menus of
charbroiled steak, golden French toast, and prunes. _

A charming children’s menu from the Union Pacific Railroad
Company., Northwestern University Transportation Library

 

Ira Silverman was always on the go. In the late 1960s, the train
enthusiast enrolled in Northwestern University’s Transportation
Center in Evanston, near the great national rail hub of Chicago. This
proximity gave young Silverman and his classmates opportunities for
research, adventure, and unparalleled feasting.

As graduate students in railroad transport, they regularly hopped on
privately operated railroads that carried them to distant cities. But
they always made sure to catch the evening return train, so that they
could relish meals in a dining car while watching the shifting
American landscape. With standard fare such as charbroiled steak, lamb
chops, and fresh filet of sole, the experience probably far surpassed
eating on campus.

Silverman, now 73, clearly cherished these memories. He began
collecting dining car menus, eventually amassing an archive of 238
menus and related pamphlets. After a long career in transit, he
donated the collection to his alma mater’s Transportation Library,
which recently digitized it in its entirety. The pages (almost all,
impressively, unstained) offer a mouthwatering journey down the rabbit
hole of deluxe railroad dining, when well-heeled travelers expected to
sit at tables draped in white linen and indulge in outstanding meals
plated on china.

With Amtrak’s announcement that it is gradually eliminating the
traditional dining car on its routes as a cost-saving measure, that
experience—already simplified over the decades—might become a
thing of the past. It’s part of a long slide that’s seen dining
cars say farewell to fresh French toast
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a perennial train favorite across the country, and hello to
prepackaged chicken fettuccini.

“The mid-20th century seems to have been a golden age of railroad
dining,” says Rachel Cole, Northwestern University’s
Transportation Librarian. “It was never something that railroads
profited on, but they used it to compete against each other and
attract passengers. They took a lot of pride in offering selections
that would be rivaled in restaurants.”

Some railroads would entice riders to the dining car with signature
dishes. The Northern Pacific advertised its Great Baked Potato, a
monstrous spud that could weigh anywhere between two to five pounds
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Northern Pacific-branded spoon and an appropriately sized butter pat.
The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad offered a popular “Help Yourself”
salad, drizzled with Catalina dressing and blue cheese that a server
would lug around in a huge bowl at dinner. Aboard a Gulf, Mobile &
Ohio train, passengers seeking extra extravagance could order a
special chicken sandwich embellished with hard-boiled egg, Thousand
Island dressing, and caviar. The curious combo cost $2.25, or about
$18.40 in today’s dollars.

Then there were the drinks. Libations ranged from a classic martini to
a Rob Roy to a complimentary bottle of rosé with dinner on the Penn
Central. The Southern Pacific hosted a “Cocktail Time” with free
hors d’oeuvres (plus a “Coffee Hour” in its lounge) which it
plugged as “an excellent opportunity to get together for an
enjoyable interlude.” A New York, New Haven, and Hartford menu
teased: “For a real appetizer, enjoy antique bourbon on the
rocks.” To accompany their chosen booze, adults could also purchase
cigarettes, cigars, and playing cards. Unsurprisingly, aspirin and
Alka-Seltzer were often included on the bill of fare.

The Ira Silverman Railroad Menu Collection is particularly rich in
menus from 1960 to 1971, the final decade of privately operated
long-distance train travel in America. By then, people had been
devouring freshly prepped meals aboard trains for nearly a century. It
all started in 1868, when George Pullman’s Palace Car Company
introduced a railroad car with a small kitchen and two dining areas.
(Almost exclusively, Pullman employed formerly enslaved
African-Americans as porters and dining car waiters. They were
paid poorly and endured blatant racism on a regular basis.) Railroad
dining reached its pinnacle in 1930, as author James D. Porterfield
notes in _Dining by Rail: The History and Recipes of America’s
Golden Age of Railroad Cuisine_. That year, 1,732 dining cars were
registered with the Interstate Commerce Commission, a former
government agency that regulated the services of transportation
carriers
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The earliest menu Silverman acquired was once perused by passengers
aboard the famed 20th Century Limited train, which traveled between
New York City and Chicago. It dates to 1939, one year after luxury Art
Deco cars by industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss were added to the
route. The train, majestic and futuristic, adorns the menu’s front
cover; the back features a map illustrating connections from Grand
Central Terminal to the World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows. Inside, an
array of classy options speaks to an exemplary railroad dining
service. Diners could opt for an opulent six-course dinner featuring
English loin chop with kidney and fresh mushrooms, or exercise more
freedom with the _à la carte_ menu, which boasted genuine Russian
caviar on toast and grilled French sardines. (Cary Grant, playing an
adman in Alfred Hitchcock’s _North by Northwest,_ orders a brook
trout with his Gibson on the 20th Century Limited
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“You come across four- or five-course dinners pretty often,” Cole
says. “Jellied, mid-century things also come up very often.” Among
the smaller plates on the 1939 menu, for instance, are a cup of
jellied consommé and jellied tomato _madrilene_—a cold
tomato-based soup. Many common railroad dishes would be considered
offbeat to the 21st-century Amtrak rider. Long gone are the days when
Welsh rarebit (fancy cheese on toast), kippered herring with eggs, and
preserved figs were _de rigueur_. Plus, prunes often popped up,
prepped in myriad ways: juiced, steamed, stewed with cream, cooked in
syrup, and, for kids aboard the Union Pacific, puréed. Minors on that
fleet would perhaps have preferred to slurp down a
milkshake—available in chocolate, strawberry, or pineapple—or save
room for freshly baked pie.

As Cole notes, “Children’s dining experiences were more
sophisticated than we might imagine today.” She points out that
menus for those age 12 and under offered much more than peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches, instead featuring items such as grilled lamb
chops, roast beef, and seasonal fish.

Gene Arenson, a self-described “lifelong railroad fan and
advocate,” still remembers the first dining car meal he had, when he
was a high school student. “It was a nice steak dinner with a baked
potato and dessert, on the San Francisco Zephyr from Chicago to San
Francisco in 1974,” he says. “In fact, I remember the server. His
name was Ernie—quite a colorful guy. He took excellent service. But
to be able to look out the window while you’re eating … you
can’t describe it.”

This past August, Arenson launched a Change.org petition
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Amtrak and Congress to keep traditional dining car service on all
long-distance trains. The railroad service, which on October 1 began
cutting the amenity from long-distance routes east of the Mississippi
River, replaced it with a “flexible dining menu” with
ready-to-serve meals for sleeper car customers. The change, according
to Amtrak, will save the company $2 million annually. Plus, as its
executives have argued, millennials apparently aren’t comfortable
with the idea of sharing tables with strangers.

“To me, that’s just malarkey,” Arenson says. “I’ve spoken to
other people, and they’ve all agreed that that’s not an issue.”
The new meals, he adds, are “glorified TV dinners. They look sloppy,
never appetizing, and loaded with fat and sodium. Meanwhile, coach
passengers are now at the mercy of the café car, which is a glorified
7-Eleven.”

Many railroad advocates, he adds, fear that the cuts will eventually
roll over onto the West Coast trains, too. Arenson has since been
working with congressional representatives and the National
Association of Railroad Passengers to call on Amtrak to rethink its
strategy. “People are expecting to get what they pay for,” he
says. With him are 146,647 signatories so far, many of whom have left
comments describing the timeless romance of the dining car that draws
them to train travel.

As for Amtrak’s claim that millennials are killing the dining car,
Cole adds that it’s worth remembering that Silverman started
collecting menus when he was a young person. “He took train rides
just to enjoy the dining car experience,” she says. “I think that
continues today. There are a lot of young people who enjoy that
experience as much as he did.”

_Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink._
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