When railroad dining cars were the height of luxury
cnn.com
cnn.com
Benelux doesn't have dining cars at all, and in France and Italy the best you can usually hope for is a cafe-car that will give you coffee or at most a microwaved snack to take back to your seat.
On the other hand, the German, Swiss and Polish railways still have services with true dining cars where you can sit at a table, a waiter will take your order, then bring you a good-quality hot meal served on a real plate with real silverware (and at least in Poland, actually cooked to order on the train).
Oddly, in some cases eating the dining-car food at your seat is seen as a more premium experience. On Swiss trains, only standard-class passengers need to use the dining car- a member of staff walks through the first class section taking food orders which are then brought to your seat. In my experience of Poland's flagship high-speed EIP services, there are no chairs in the restaurant car- you can either stand and eat at one of the small bar-type tables, or order your food to be brought to your seat.
One interesting case is Japan where a full dining car is a rarity and you’re expected to buy station meals when you depart.
Riding a shinkansen isn't like riding some old-time long-distance train in Europe or North America; it's basically just like riding in an airliner, but on the ground and without TSA and the seats have more legroom. It's all about speed and convenience, not luxury.
There are, however, some luxury trains in Japan on some routes. They're not bullet trains though, and usually meant more for sightseeing travel.
It might not actually be profitable, but it sure is sweet.
ICE trains run on the same lines used by slower services, and no train in Germany exceeds 300 km/h, with even that speed being attained only on quite small upgraded parts of the network.
The European rail network most similar to Shinkansen would be TGV.
While the high-speed tracks in Germany are indeed quite a bit of a patch-work, there are over 1000 km of track certified for >= 250 km/h (as of 2015; quite a number of more lines got finished since then, but I could not find the updated number that included them) and by now really rather long corridors are very high-speed. The route from Munich (south of Germany) to Berlin is now mostly covered with upgraded routes for example. I think the 4 hours for that route are quite competitive to Shinkansen times. The fastest Shinkansen route (from the listed operating speed the only one that actually operates at 320 km/h; all others only operate at 260-300 km/h) is the Tōhoku Shinkansen line, which takes 3 hours and 20 minutes for the same distance traveled.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. Gran class seats on a shinkansen are some of the fanciest I’ve seen. It’s not quite like a first class airliner, but I think that’s more related to the shorter journeys.
It would probably be more luxurious to put in private train compartments, which already exist on Japanese trains, but not on Shinkansen due to a capacity crunch.
Station meals make far more sense in general - there is a lot more space to work with. You can also put multiple options (rent space to different restaurants) in a station. The only downside of this is you need enough flex so that people can get off when hungry eat and get on a different train (meaning both empty seats for them and multiple train options). Still trains have different economics from airplanes and should attempt to run no more than 70% full.
It would mean arriving an hour (or more) later at the destination. It's usually preferable to eat at the destination, or make do with eating on the train (in a dining car, snacks sold on-board, or something purchased at the station or brought from home).
Firstly, it's very difficult to make it profitable, given the limited number of passengers you can serve on a relatively short journey, the staff costs of running a kitchen plus waiting staff for ~10 tables and the limited price you can charge before the reputation of the train company starts to take a hit for "excessively expensive food".
Secondly, British trains on popular routes are now overfull. Capacity is bounded by trains/hour (fixed), maximum train length (fixed, by signal block and platform lengths), and capacity per coach. So we're optimising for the latter: thin seats to maximise density and a loss of luggage vans, kitchens, extra toilets, and other facilities that take up space but don't seat passengers.
The modern standard is a catering trolley that serves coffee and snacks at your seat. Because it lives in the aisle and moves, it doesn't take up revenue space. Because it mostly sells coffee and alcohol, it turns over a lot more per hour with only one staff member.
I’d imagine that high-speed services operating the integral trainsets do not offer this flexibility, so they’d naturally opt for maxing-out seat capacity.
Also worth noting that just recently the European Sleeper, a new contender on the EU rail map, introduced a dining car with an interesting fix-prix approach to menu. I suppose they estimated they could make it profitable, but notably, they too only offer it on some of the services only. The reviews on YouTube seem to praise the quality and overall experience. I personally think that night trains in particular will see the dining cars a necessity.
This wasn't a luxury thing that said: we had a Lada (btw shittiest car brand ever and the Lada Niva, the 4x4, is the shittiest, scariest, piece of turd of a 4x4 ever made: this thing will flip over at 12 mph in S-turn no question asked and if you think Lada made good cars you know jack shit about cars). OK, ok, now I digress: maybe it's because my parents had a Lada and it was an utter piece of junk that I now drive a high-end luxury car: surely a seven years long psychoanalysis would figure that one out.
So yup, loading the Lada on the train and eating in the restaurant car.
The people doing the same around that time were typical middle class (and I don't dispute TFA saying that before that it used to be the height of luxury).
There are people that think Ladas are good cars?
All it takes is watching Russian/Eastern Europe dash cam compilations to know that Lada cars are complete and utter garbage. Terrible handling and they absolutely shatter like glass in a crash. Crumple zones are great, but the entire car shouldn't be a crumple zone.
I doubt they'd meet any USA safety standards.
The 'mini-twin' option, that included a sophisticated dining experience - perhaps not quite as the 1883 experience described in TFA, but really good.
We were escorted on board, shown our room, with two big comfy seats, politely encouraged to drop our bags and head down to the restaurant car, while they converted the room to sleep-mode. (Similar process, in reverse, in the morning.)
Cost was £289.00 for two people - flights would have been a bit cheaper but a whole lot more bother, and as usual once you factor in transport + accom + food for that period, flights get even less compelling.
Can recommend these more sedate options while travelling, but perhaps that's an increasingly rare luxury.
* An ocean liner provides transportation between a source and a destination. Historically they were often used to transport mail, thus RMS and variations (Royal Mail [Motor] Ship/Vessel; "Motor" was used when most ships were steamships. I can't find a canonical answer for "vessel" but examples tend to be small ships with short routes to islands, rather than going between continents).
* A cruise ship runs around in a circle visiting tourist spots, and generally don't have to be built as strongly.
Recent ocean liners operate as cruise ships for part of the year.
What actually happened is that a much cheaper, bare-bones product made flying available to much more of the population.
Here are a couple of photos: https://gist.github.com/simonw/b077396a0c27b32312d2a18eebd49...
Turns out it gave me confidence in defending my positions to strangers, improved my small talk game, and exposed me to viewpoints I’d never consider otherwise.
And the food was amazing, too. Way better than anything I’ve had on a plane or in an airport.
During that trip, the company at breakfast was a nightmare. I sat across from two very drunk young men who were traveling on there father's money. At one point they started a fight with our waiter. Thankfully, our dinner companions made up for it by being delightful.
I completely agree about the quality of the food. For dinner I ate the steak, and it was quite good.
So there I was, a late 50s anglo-american white programmer having a polite disagreement with a mid-30s african-american rapper about why Kanye West was either shit or a genius. For the record, I was in the shit camp.
Amtrak - bring America together, slowly.
I'd occasionally take the train from Vancouver, BC to Seattle when visiting a girlfriend, and I was far less messed up after I got there.
Meeting random passengers can be an added bonus.
But I still like the dining car and observation car.
(GWR is no relation to the original company of the same name, by the way. It's a modern creation, named to capitalise on the positive associations of Brunel's memory.)
The quoted price was in the 10s of thousands of euros for a week.
Really puts it in to perspective how luxurious those things were.
Though obviously not the same, as these are meant solely for dining and sight-seeing, not actual travel.
There are others in Peru, India (Delhi to Agra), Venice, South Africa, Japan, Australia, and Scotland:
<https://www.cntraveler.com/story/luxury-trains-with-the-best...>
That seems like a shame! Although, the worst one used to have no windows and steam blowing into the compartment, so I guess the situation has improved somewhat.
https://restaurantlecontinental.com/en/
One of the best restaurants on the planet, and zero pretentiousness. ~_*
https://www.europeansleeper.eu/dining-car
The Orient Express is a fancy fantasy tour, like a high-end cruise; great for Poirot re-enactors. But Europe's network of sleeper trains is slowly expanding again, and now features at least one dining car service. The best part is that while not cheap, they are certainly affordable.
We found Eric Adams’ HN account. And got a clue about where he really lives!
But, the system worked differently. There were "coupe" cars: the car is divided into small compartment for four people each. Each compartment has a door, a table the four have to share. Two double-decked beds. Upon request fitted with a hammock-like net that served as a crib.
Then there were "platz-kart" cars: similar idea, but six people per compartment. No doors (you could see into compartments adjacent to yours). These also had "third floor" of beds (so, potentially could house nine people, but the top floor didn't have padding and was originally designed for luggage).
Then there were "common" cars: these were usually the same as "platz-kart", but the third floor counted as a legitimate sitting place.
Then, as times got worse, the "common" class of cars became more prevalent, and sometimes these would be repurposed short-distance train cars that didn't have any place to sleep at all (just chairs, like on a plain, or wooden benches).
Any train had all kinds of cars, what was different was the proportion (as Soviet Union was headed towards its collapse, there were fewer and fewer "coupe" cars and more "common" ones). But, even in the worst times of the late 90's there still were dining cars. At some point train stuff stopped serving tea, which was the hallmark of any train travel: it came in special cups with heavy steel holders and with two bricks of sugar with the picture of train...
In my last visit to the dining car, the only dish on the menu was pelmeni (Russian-style wantons) with vinegar (a more upscale version is served with sour-cream) and vodka for dessert... Even by the standards of the day it was sad. But, hey, they still had a dining car!