Sunday liquor?

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Palmland

Palmland

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May 25, 2006
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I'm on train 89 and tried to order a beer with lunch. The cafe attendant said he could not sell liquor on Sunday for the entire NYP-SAV route. Is that a new rule or is he just wrong?
 
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Palmland said:
I'm on train 89 and tried to order a beer with lunch. The cafe attendant said he could not sell liquor on Sunday for the entire NYP-SAV route. Is that a new rule or is just wrong?
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State law for your location? (I'm not familiar with that area)
 
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Unlike an airline (unfortunately) Amtrak has to chooses to follow the local liquor laws of the jurisdiction it is currently passing through.

(edited to change 'has to' to 'chooses to' - a strong argument can be made that local liquor laws don't apply to interstate commerce under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granholm_v._Healdbut I don't think that Amtrak has made any challenge to it. They should, since they need all the F&B revenue they can get.)
 
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Every State has its own Liquor Laws and Amtrak has to follow them!

IINM only New Orleans and Nevada have Unlimited Alcohol Consumption at all times.

I was on the Texas Eagle this morning and in Texas Alcohol can't be sold on Sunday before Noon.

Lots of passengers were trying to order Bloody Marys for Breakfast!
 
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Bob Dylan said:
Every State has its own Liquor Laws and Amtrak has to follow them!

IINM only New Orleans and Nevada have Unlimited Alcohol Consumption at all times.
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Nevada is complicated. If you're talking about open container laws and drinking on the sidewalk, they have a bunch of local laws depending on where it happens. Clark County has its own ordinances that would apply to most of the Las Vegas Strip that's unincorporated. The city of Las Vegas has rules depending on how close one is to a place that sells liquor or a church/hospital/school. Reno doesn't allow except for special events.
 
The local liquor statutes were in place long before Amtrak started. For example, the Kansas City Southern which ran passenger trains from Kansas City to New Orleans and to Beaumont had lounge cars on most of their trains, Under the equipment information in their timetables, outlines the lounge cars, but states bar service in Missouri and Louisiana only. An announcement was made on the train when they had to stop serving liquor when the train was approaching a dry state.
 
I was on 97 on a Sunday a few years ago. The announcement came over the speaker upon leaving Jacksonville, that if one wanted liquor, get it before entering Georgia. No liquor sales at all in Georgia on Sunday.
 
I have gotten beer on the Palmetto on Sunday before. I wonder if it was easier for Amtrak to not offer liquor at on the entire route than ask the attendant to figure out what state they were in.
 
Seems like Congress should be able to over ride the local prohibitions. When I interned for the Alexandria Dukes minor league team front office many moons ago, the team wasn't allowed to sell alcohol at all because it was playing at the end of an elementary school. (The team moved out of town the following year for this and many other reasons.)

The sole exception to the alcohol prohibition was the evening of the annual congressional softball game, when the beers flowed freely. Nothing like a drunk congress critter playing softball.

If they could over ride the locals then, why can't they do it now to help the Amtrak F&B budget?
 
A couple of months ago, I boarded the LSL on a Sunday evening. Just after pulling out of Chicago station, I went to the cafe car to get a glass of wine. The attendent said he couldn't sell alcohol on Sunday. The fellow behind me asked if he could buy a drink after we got into Indiana. He was told no. That car sure emptied out fast!
 
I am traveling from Portland to Chicago on the EB in a month and a half, and my train is expected to pass thru MT and ND on Sunday. How will the local laws affect the EB in those states in regards to alcohol sales?
 
My understanding of the liquor laws as they applied in the streamliner era is that the South (especially) was a patchwork of dry counties and wet counties. The way the law was written, if you bought a drink in a wet county you could keep drinking it if the train crossed the line into a dry county, but you could not be served alcohol in a dry county. This meant that the steward not only had to know the local laws and regulations for each city and county and state that the train passed through, he had to know exactly where the train was at all times, day or night...as it was not past some of those small-town sheriffs to put a deputy on the train undercover, in plain clothes, to have him try to order a drink in the wrong place so he could write the train crew a ticket!
 
Palmland said:
I'm still having a problem believing that all 9 states the Palmetto passes through have laws prohibiting Sunday sales for liquor.
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If most or even many of them do I can see the cafe attendant (and his managers?) not wanting to take chances....
 
ehbowen said:
Palmland said:
I'm still having a problem believing that all 9 states the Palmetto passes through have laws prohibiting Sunday sales for liquor.
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If most or even many of them do I can see the cafe attendant (and his managers?) not wanting to take chances....
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There's a copy of the service standards floating around this board. Since the Palmetto runs during early hours on a Sunday, there are states that would prohibit the sale of alcohol. However, unless something has changed, all states along the route do not prohibit the sale of alcohol.

I can certainly see someone not wanting to take a chance crossing the border of various states and running afoul with their law.
 
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Lounge attendant on B&O's Capitol Limited in pre-Amtrak days used to advise customers when the train was approaching Maryland, which did not allow sales on any days outside of ABC stores.
 
"Lunch" implies around noon at the earliest, which means that only North Carolina has a law that would have impacted a sale. If it was after noon, none of the states on that route have any law that would have made an alcohol sale illegal. Some of the counties in South Carolina have laws that would have, though, but knowing the Palmetto schedule...lunch would also rule that out.
 
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