There is a lot going on in the world right now. Oceans are rising. Empires are tottering. New rights are being won in some places just as those same rights are being lost in others. Everything feels like it’s on the brink of something momentous, something great, although, as Ollivander explains to Harry when he’s helping him pick out his wand, great can mean both terrible and good. And so it is against this background—this background of great things, both terrible and good, that I want to talk about something that it is, I believe, of vital and immediate importance.
I want to talk about the impending death of the Amtrak dining car.
Recently it was announced that beginning in 2020, the traditional dining car meal service would be discontinued on some trains and replaced with what Amtrak is calling “a la carte” style dining. This means no more Amtrak kitchen (the meals would be pre-packaged), no more dining car reservations, and, most importantly, no more being forced to sit with strangers as you await your medium rare steak and baked potato on a plastic plate.
This, to anyone who has not experienced the Amtrak dining car, probably sounds like a good thing. Because, really, who want to sit with strangers while they eat? Eating is a surprisingly intimate and vulnerable act, so much so that even the busiest of restaurants wouldn’t dream of asking diners to share a table, no matter how long the wait. Wouldn’t dream of it, that is, until that busy restaurant is also hurtling across the landscape at the same time, trying to keep to a schedule that is entirely independent of people’s dining choices.
This is the point at which I would normally be expected to wax poetic about how the Amtrak dining car is the Great Equalizer, or something like that. About how by being forced to eat with strangers we soon come to realize that we have more in common than we know, that our differences are really not that vast, and that, underneath it all, we are all the same. Which is a lovely sentiment, and maybe true on some other level, but is not at all what I’m trying to convey here.
For starters, the Amtrak dining car is NOT the Great Equalizer: it is almost entirely made up of people from the sleeping cars, and those people have paid at the very least double what the people in coach have paid to be on that same train. No, if you want that kind of equality you would have much better luck in the cafe car. And secondly, the dining car subset of slightly-well-off people is also made up of the even smaller subset of people who can’t or won’t fly, either because of fear, or discomfort, or simply not being allowed (although it is not usually the conversation starter, I have met people on the “no fly” list in the dining car). So, no, the people in the dining car are neither “a slice of life” or “just like you and me.” Or rather, they are exactly like you and me, in that they are all just a little bit weird. Just as I am weird. And, hopefully, as you are weird, too.
On my most recent Amtrak trip I sat next to an elderly Japanese woman who was making her annual trek to see Johnny Mathis in Branson, Missouri, and a real estate developer who built luxury homes but, for unrevealed reasons was no longer “allowed” to fly. And who eagerly passed on her advice of “always add an elevator—wealthy people don’t like to walk up stairs.”
They were both really weird. Delightfully weird. And without the Amtrak dining car, I would not have gotten to experience quite that particular kind of weirdness—or rather, I might have experienced it, but would have then been free to take note of it and then move on, leaving both of those people to linger as “quirky” stereotypes in my rear view. But because all of this was revealed before the salad, when we still had two more courses to go, I was able to catch a glimpse of the person beneath the quirk.
Don’t get me wrong: at the end of the meal they were still weird. As I’m sure I was still weird to them. But, hopefully, we were all just a little bit more real to each other as well. And that is what makes the Amtrak dining car still so very necessary—and still, for as long as it lasts, so very great.
In every possible sense of the word.