United Rail Passenger Alliance

Volume 3 Number 15

1. Food and beverage service on Amtrak doesn’t have to be something akin to a national shame. It has the potential to be pleasant, profitable, and nourishing. It has the potential to be good, rather than a necessity begrudgingly dished out by a common carrier with no ambition for good passenger service.There is a myth in railroading, that dining cars and the food service business are perpetual money losers. This is analogous to an urban myth that just won’t go away. Some will quickly say that even the private, pre-Amtrak passenger railroads didn’t make money on dining cars. Harrumph. Railroads have been manipulating financial numbers for over a century and a half to suit their needs, and dining car numbers were no exception. Back in the dark old days of the 1960s, at the end of private passenger rail service as we historically knew it, dining cars were shown to be money losers simply as a tool to get rid of them and in turn ultimately get rid of the trains they served.

   (more…)