http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091225/NEWS16/912250322

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Article published December 25, 2009

 

Dining cars once eased the way for travelers in Yuletide season

 

By CHINA MILLMAN

BLOCK NEWS ALLIANCE

The Toledo Blade

 

For most people traveling to holiday destinations, whether by plane, train, or automobile, the journey is something to be endured and forgotten. Conditions are spartan and amenities are next to none.

 

Yet it wasn't always this way. Before a car was parked in every driveway and highways connected every corner of the country, traveling took longer, but people had a far better time getting where they were going.

 

Passengers who boarded the Chicago & Alton Rail Road on Christmas Day in 1922 sat down to a meal that started with bluepoint oysters on the half shell, continued with roast young turkey, and finished with English plum pudding, cake, and ice cream, all for $1.50.

 

This meal was by no means out of the ordinary.

 

 

Full story at above link:

Menus were more restrained during WWII, I believe. People were admonished to travel only when absolutely necessary in order to leave room and capacity for military personnel.

 

My dad had a physical deferment and worked in one of GE's defense plants. He had to make a business trip to Chicago, and he managed to finagle permission to take me along. We lived in Decatur, Indiana and I had just started attending Lincoln School. He got me out of school for the day, and before dawn we set out for the Erie depot. I still remember the smell of hot brakes mingled with steam from the heating pipes as the train pulled up to the platform, and until the end of steam heat on Amtrak, around 1980, the arrival of trains in winter always brought back that memory. We traveled behind a steam locomotive and arrived in Chicago at Dearborn Station.

 

On the way, we had breakfast in the diner. Dad had bacon and eggs with toast and coffee, and I had oatmeal. The oatmeal had cooled and congealed into a grey-brown gelatinous lump in the bowl, and it was served with skim milk. I called it "blue milk" from the pale, watery color of it, and for many years into my adulthood, the term still would come up in conversations with Dad when we ate in restaurants.

 

Breakfast in the Diner, Broadway Limited en route to Chicago from Fort Wayne, Black Friday, 1972:

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Looks like the interior of an original PRR diner from the Broadway. The waiters look sharp in those jackets and the whole scene is much better than anything offered today. I miss the days when trains were TRAINS, not glorified buses!

 

BTW, I was fortunate enough to ride the B&O Nationbal Limited St. Louis-Washington and back. The minute I saw that blue china with the historical B&O motive power in a chronological progression around the rim  of the dinner plates, I was wide eyed!!! Having dinner while America rolls by is an experience everyone should have.

In the seventies and early eighties when I traveled more than five or six hours, I got a roomette or slumbercoach whenever possible ("A gentleman always rides in the sleeping cars" - E.M. Frimbo). Before going to the diner for a meal, I always put on dark trousers with a crease in them, shiny shoes, and a white shirt and tie. The atmosphere and service then merited it, and I think I often was treated more cordially by the staff, some of whom could be a little long on fancy-restaurant stiffness and attitude toward passengers who didn't measure up to their expectations.

 

Besides, dressing a cut above the average always has made me feel a little more self-confident and in control of my surroundings. I don't do it much any more, now that I've retired.

 

Edit: I think you can buy reproduction B&O China, if the original is unobtainable or too pricey for you. They used to sell it in the gift shop at the B&O Museum in Baltimore; I don't know if they still do. Even a nice cup and saucer for your afternoon tea might be a nice thing.