I may have to eat my words. I'll be posting a full explanation/description/pictorial on
Rafi on the Rails tomorrow (I'm on the round-the-country trip as I write this, so be sure to stop by the blog to watch the trip live), but here's the big news:
The Lake Shore is running with a single Diner/Lounge, no full diner, and three almost sold-out sleepers. The crew reports that this is their second trip in a row with the Diner/Lounge consist and have received no word as to whether the full Diner is coming back. I'll be soliciting comments from Amtrak and NARP tomorrow for Rafi on the Rails, but figured folks here would want the news first.
Stand by for more.
-Rafi
I returned last night from my two-week Amtrak travels, by way of the Cardinal. We had Diner/Lounge 28004, and the server and food preparer was Joannie (and she was fabulous).
I ate dinner, breakfast, lunch, and dinner there, and I'm very pleased to report that I enjoyed everything I ordered. The food was IMO every bit as good as full Heritage or Superliner SDS dining car fare. For the record, I had the mozzarella sticks, salmon entree, scrambled eggs & hash browns, Gardenburger, ravioli entree, and vanilla & chocolate ice creams, as well as two "split" ($5) mini-bottles of wine. I actually liked the menu a lot more than the SDS menu. Two fewer dinner entrees, but what they had was excellent; the appetizers are a nice addition which I and my dining companions enjoyed (the spring rolls were popular); the scrambled eggs breakfast was a great addition; the ice cream is fantastic; the small wine bottles are much-needed; and the prices are generally $2-$4 cheaper than equivalent fare in a full dining car. The "big" food difference is that you don't get a salad and roll with dinner entrees. I didn't miss that.
The problem--the very big problem--is that 28004 had potential seating for 20 (three full two-bench tables on one side of the car; one full two-bench table, one one-bench "handicapped accessible" table, and one single-bench table on the other side) plus the potential space for one or two handicapped patrons. In practice, it had seating for only 14. One full two-bench table (the one nearest the steam table) was completely filled with crew administration paperwork and unavailable for seating; and the half-table (across from the administrative table) was completely filled with linens and table settings and likewise unavailable. The handicapped area was pretty cluttered with more supply boxes, such that you couldn't actually fit a wheelchair in there, not that this was necessary to try on our train.
The Cardinal only had one sleeper plus two coaches (I think; maybe three, but I was in the rearmost and didn't walk forward through the train nor see the front half at CHI or PHL), not counting the two Hoosier coaches we left in Indianapolis after the first dinner. Seating was in high-demand, and while I think everyone was eventually squeezed in for each meal, it was a logistical nightmare with lots of passengers waiting in the cafe section to be called and in some instances waiting for over an hour. There was not a reservation system after the first dinner, and for that reservations were only offered to sleeper passengers. The dining-option was never officially announced to coach, and I and one other coach passenger only knew about it for the first dinner because we were savvy riders who knew the car would be in the Cardinal's consist and were eager to try it. Others later discovered it, but for all four meals, I saw probably a total of six different coach passengers eat there.
With three sleepers on the LSL, this will be an unmitigated disaster.
I talked to Joannie about the car (she was very impressed I took such an interest in Amtrak dining service and moreover that I was actively encouraging my fellow diners to offer feedback to Amtrak
), and she said 28004 has been in this configuration for about six months, during which it has run mostly on the Cardinal but a few times on the LSL. She told me the LSL was slated to permanently lose its dining car for a diner/lounge, and that she thought more trains with full dining cars would go the same way in the near future as more cars get turned into diner/lounges--she was quite certain that Amtrak's eventual goal was to substantially reduce dining cars, not just to upgrade cafe cars.
Unless they increase capacity substantially, by for instance retrofitting dining car kitchens to offer only the new menus and run them in conjunction with diner/lounges on routes like the LSL (which is a possible interpretation of her comments, though not necessarily the intuitive interpretation), things will go very, very wrong.
Perhaps they'll eventually run full diner-lite (dinette? what would they call them) Amfleet ex-cafes, serving the dining fare with linens on both halves, and also a full cafe car (ye olde cafe car), on trains like the LSL which formerly featured a full dining car and a cafe car? That would solve the capacity problem, and they could do it with one service crew member in the cafe and two in the diner-lite (one serving each half), which still amounts to a crew-cost savings of, what, four people over a dining car plus cafe?
