I suspect, personally, that dining cars ARE hugely problematic for Amtrak's costs, even though I like eating in them. Even in the halcyon days of railroads, dining cars always lost money
From my research, this last statement seems to be false. There seems to be quite a lot of evidence that some dining car services broke even or made small profits during some of the early decades (19th century).
Pullman introduced the "Delmonico" in 1868, and appears to have made a profit on it, initially running on the busy (and short) Chicago & Alton. With the dining cars as a separate operation from the train service, he *had* to make a profit on the dining service alone, and he did.
I haven't done my full research and dug into the 19th century accounts enough to know exactly what accounting was being used; for all I know, the railroads paid him to haul the cars. But for him, the dining service was profitable. Of course, labor was cheap at the time.
The dining cars allowed the railroads to eliminate "meal stops" from the train routes; trains without dining cars had to have meal stops. This train delay cost a vast amount of revenue. The main profit for the railroads from the dining cars was then, as it is now, the elimination of meal stops.
The Santa Fe, apparently, continued to use the Harvey Houses for meal stops for many years after other companies were running dining cars. This worked for their long, desolate western routes, but eventually they surrendered to the dining car trend. However, out west dining car service was much iffier financially than it was on a high-volume route like the Chicago & Alton...
(the difference is, the rest of the operation made a profit that could pay for them as a loss leader, which isn't true now). When the railroads were still private and were trying to cut costs in the 1960's full service diners were often downgraded to cheaper snack cars and automat cars. That's a good indicator that they must have been bleeding money.
By *then*, with higher wages and lower ridership, they were.
A key point here is volume. The initial dining cars in the 19th century were carrying huge volumes of patronage. You absolutely cannot support a dining car on low volumes.
This is of course why the current Amtrak dining car situation of high prices, low quality, low turnover, and most of all *low volume* is a death spiral.
---
What Amtrak should do is to first focus on routes with a long consist, high ridership, and already-high dining car patronage, and then figure out how to increase volume and lower prices, while increasing food quality.
I would suggest increasing turnover by reducing the number of separately served courses (serving everything except dessert at once). Most people don't have multi-course meals any more. Accounting should be simplified / automated in order to reduce the amount of time wasted by staff on that, so that staff can spend more time serving customers. And the dining car should be open as many hours as possible, again to get more volume. If it starts bursting at the seams, Amtrak is doing it right and should add a table car.
The Auto Train has the largest passenger capacity of all, and is scheduled so that 100% of the passengers need a meal. The Empire Builder has the second-largest capacity overall (in summer), so can be considered the train with the second-highest total potential for patronage. (And the Empire Builder crews have a much more efficient table-turning procedure than the SW Chief or CZ, probably because they *need* to. The PIP proposed adding a "first class lounge" to the Empire Builder in order to relieve the pressure on the dining car -- so that they don't have to turn customers away -- though a table car might do just as well.) The LSL gets the highest dining car patronage from coach cars; and also has the highest total capacity in the consist of the single-level trains. All of these regularly have high passenger loads, as well.
These are cases where some careful, competent management (as opposed to the Congressional meddling we've seen) might bring the dining cars closer to break-even. The Cardinal with its current short consist? No chance. Frankly, the Southwest Chief, probably no chance either.
(Edited to remove garbled sentence)
The Cardinal's current three-a-week situation is really not acceptable. Basically Amtrak is paying several million dollars a year and wearing out equipment in order to keep a placeholder in place for potential future service. Same situation with the Sunset Limited.
