To make for luxury all manner of devices have been added to these cars. The superintendent sometimes hears complaints from a traveller that the sharp curves on some mountain division have spilled the water on his bath-tub; and the switching-crews at the big terminals know that turntables are kept busy turning the big observation platform cars so that they will “set right,” and the big piazza-like platform will rest squarely at the rear of the train. For those persons who wish to pay for the luxury there are staterooms, and the best of these staterooms have the baths and big comfortable brass beds. After many years of unsatisfactory experiment the electric light has come into its own upon the railroad train; and even upon unpretentious trains the night traveller no longer has to wrestle with the difficulties of dressing or undressing in an absolutely dark berth.
Once the problem of housing folk at night had been met and solved, another rose. If travellers might sleep upon a train, why might they not eat there, too? The American eating-houses had met with a degree of fame. There are old fellows who will still tell you of the glories of the dining-rooms at Springfield, at Poughkeepsie, at Hornellsville, and at Altoona. But the eating-house scheme had its great disadvantages. For one thing, it caused a delay in the progress of through fast trains to halt them three times a day while the passengers piled out of the cars and went across to some lunch-counter or dining-room to ruin their digestions in the twenty minutes allotted for each meal. For another thing, the process of clambering in and out of the comfortable train in all sorts of weather was unpopular. The well-established and equally well-famed eating-houses along the trunk-line railroads were doomed from the time that the Pioneer won its first success.
No more should a train tie up at meal-time than a steamboat should tie up at her wharf for a similar purpose. The first dining-cars were called hotel-cars; and the first of these, the President, was placed in operation by the Pullman company on the Great Western Railway—now the Grand Trunk—of Canada, in 1867. The hotel-car was nothing more or less than a sleeping-car with a kitchen built in at one end and facilities for serving meals at tables placed at the berths. It was well enough in its way, but travellers demanded something better, something more hygienic than eating meals in a sleeping place.
Pullman went hard at his problem, and in another year he had evolved the first real dining-car, the Delmonico, which went into regular service on the Chicago & Alton Railway. The Delmonico was a pretty complete sort of a restaurant on wheels, and not far different from the dining-car of to-day.
To-day there are 750 successors to the old Delmonico in daily service on the railroads of the United States. A small regiment of men earn their livelihood upon them; some genius, handy with a lead pencil, has estimated that these serve some 60,000 meals—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—every day. The amount of food and drink consumed is a matter that is left to the statistician.
The average full-sized dining-car seats 40 persons, but that does not represent the business it does. Unless the car can be completely filled two or more times at each meal, it is not considered a profitable run. The European method of reserving seats at “first table” or “second table” has never obtained in the United States, and the wise man on a popular train sacrifices his dignity and hurries toward the dining-car at the first intimation that the meal is ready.
To take care of the hungry folk a dining-car crew of nine men is kept busy. The car is in absolute charge of a conductor or steward, who is held sharply accountable by the dining-car superintendent of the road for the conduct of his men and of his car. He signs a receipt for the car equipment before starting on his run out over the line, and he must see to it that none of that equipment, not a single napkin or spoon out of all his stock, is missing at its end. He is held in as strict account for the appearance and behavior of his men. The waiters must be neatly dressed, must have clean linen; the conductor himself must be something of a Beau Brummel, carrying a certain polite smile toward each one of the road’s patrons, no matter how disagreeable or cranky he or she may be. For all of these things and many others—maintaining a sharp guard over the car’s miniature wine-cellars, adding “specials” to the bill-of-fare for a given day, acting as a cashier for the service—he receives a princely salary, varying from $75 to $110 a month.
His crew, as far as the passengers see it, consists of five men, almost always negroes. Back in the tiny kitchen is the chef, with two assistants, preparing the food. The kitchen is tiny. It is less than five feet wide and fifteen feet long, and the three men who work within it must have a place for everything in it, including themselves. Obviously there is no room for the waiters, and these receive their supplies through a small wicket window.
If the kitchen is tiny, it is also marvellously complete. An ice-box fits upon and takes half the space of the wide vestibule platform; the range has the compact dimensions of a yacht’s range; sinks, pots, and kettles fit into inconceivably small spaces. Yet in these tiny cubbyholes one hundred, ofttimes many more dinners, of seven or eight courses each, are carefully prepared, with a skill in the cooking that is a marvel to restaurateurs.