Dining By Rail

Dining By Rail
Author: James D. Porterfield
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1998-05-15
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9780312187118

"Dining by Rail" recaptures the history and spirit of an era and offers absorbing details and sumptuous recipes to readers with an interest in railroads and Americana. 150 photos.

Food on the Rails

Food on the Rails
Author: Jeri Quinzio
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2014-10-10
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1442227338

In roughly one hundred years – from the 1870s to the 1970s – dining on trains began, soared to great heights, and then fell to earth. The founders of the first railroad companies cared more about hauling freight than feeding passengers. The only food available on trains in the mid-nineteenth century was whatever passengers brought aboard in their lunch baskets or managed to pick up at a brief station stop. It was hardly fine dining. Seeing the business possibilities in offering long-distance passengers comforts such as beds, toilets, and meals, George Pullman and other pioneering railroaders like Georges Nagelmackers of Orient Express fame, transformed rail travel. Fine dining and wines became the norm for elite railroad travelers by the turn of the twentieth century. The foods served on railroads – from consommé to turbot to soufflé, always accompanied by champagne - equaled that of the finest restaurants, hotels, and steamships. After World War II, as airline travel and automobiles became the preferred modes of travel, elegance gave way to economy. Canned and frozen foods, self-service, and quick meals and snacks became the norm. By the 1970s, the golden era of railroad dining had come grinding to a halt. Food on the Rails traces the rise and fall of food on the rails from its rocky start to its glory days to its sad demise. Looking at the foods, the service, the rail station restaurants, the menus, they dining accommodations and more, Jeri Quinzio brings to life the history of cuisine and dining in railroad cars from the early days through today.

Dining on the B&O

Dining on the B&O
Author: Thomas J. Greco
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2009-12-15
Genre: Cooking
ISBN:

The recipes collected here invite readers to prepare the dishes enjoyed by thousands of rail passengers in years gone by. Just open the book and start cooking the B&O way!

From the Dining Car

From the Dining Car
Author: James D. Porterfield
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2004-11
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9780312242015

A monthly columnist for Railfan & Railroad magazine provides a collection of recipes by today's luxury rail gourmet chefs, in a volume complemented by chef anecdotes, photographs of railroad memorabilia, and historical information.

Food on the Move

Food on the Move
Author: Sharon Hudgins
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1789140072

All aboard for a delicious ride on nine legendary railway journeys! Meals associated with train travel have been an important ingredient of railway history for more than a century—from dinners in dining cars to lunches at station buffets and foods purchased from platform vendors. For many travelers, the experience of eating on a railway journey is often a highlight of the trip, a major part of the “romance of the rails.” A delight for rail enthusiasts, foodies, and armchair travelers alike, Food on the Move serves up the culinary history of these famous journeys on five continents, from the earliest days of rail travel to the present. Chapters invite us to table for the haute cuisine of the elegant dining carriages on the Orient Express; the classic American feast of steak-and-eggs on the Santa Fe Super Chief; and home-cooked regional foods along the Trans-Siberian tracks. We eat our way across Canada’s vast interior and Australia’s spectacular and colorful Outback; grab an infamous “British railway sandwich” to munch on the Flying Scotsman; snack on spicy samosas on the Darjeeling Himalayan Toy Train; dine at high speed on Japan’s bullet train, the Shinkansen; and sip South African wines in a Blue Train—a luxury lounge-car featuring windows of glass fused with gold dust. Written by eight authors who have traveled on those legendary lines, these chapters include recipes from the dining cars and station eateries, taken from historical menus and contributed by contemporary chefs, as well as a bounty of illustrations. A toothsome commingling of dinner triangles and train whistles, this collection is a veritable feast of meals on the move.

The Harvey House Cookbook

The Harvey House Cookbook
Author: George H. Foster
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publications
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2006-03-10
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1589793218

Recipes from the original "In Harvey Service" column in the Santa Fe Railroad magazine and the employee magazine "Hospitality" published in the 1940s and 1950s intersperced with the history of the restaurants.

Last Call for the Dining Car

Last Call for the Dining Car
Author: Michael Kerr
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Railroad travel
ISBN: 9781845137700

From Michael Palin to Nicholas Crane, a riveting anthology of railway travel covers every kind of train from the luxurious Orient Express to the insanely crowded commuter trains of Bombay In an age when low-cost airlines have reduced travel to a point-to-point aerial bus service, the train can still take travelers on a genuine journey, nosing through sweeping valleys, across vertiginous viaducts, and stopping at tiny halts in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. For better or worse, it brings along its own shotgun traveling community: the delightful breakfast companions chance-met in the dining car or the crazy loner with whom one faces the prospect of sharing a sleeper compartment across the Urals. Here, Michael Kerr has gone through the archives to compile a riveting anthology of all the best railway travel that has appeared in the Daily Telegraph. Here are epic forays from Wick in northernmost Scotland all the way to Vladivostok, Moscow to Peking, and on the Sunset Express across the United States to California. Historic events such as the last day of steam in Britain and less momentous but equally emblematic experiences such as the signal failure in the Midlands are also highlighted. By turns hilarious and alarming, this is armchair travel at its very best and the perfect book indeed for a long train journey.

Waiting on a Train

Waiting on a Train
Author: James McCommons
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2009-11-06
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1603582592

During the tumultuous year of 2008--when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California--journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America--and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.