In 1997 there were 250 dining cars on the British railway network; today, the number is in single figures. The Night Riviera and the Caledonian Sleeper have restaurant cars; the only daytime one is operated by Great Western. The language describing the other ‘offers’ is a bit depressing. ‘At-seat’ food, served to first-class passengers on the East and West Coast main lines, sounds as if it’s aimed at particularly indolent people. For standard-class passengers, refreshment trolleys are still ‘making their way’ along a few trains, such as CrossCountry services. When something or someone is ‘making’ its or their ‘way’, this signifies virtuous progress. Mourners ‘make their way’ to the graveside, whereas people accused of crimes are never said to ‘make their way’ to court. I don’t think the refreshment trolley merits such reverence.
There are still some café bars on trains, but there’s a lot wrong with those, starting with the expense. And if you order tea, you get a flowerpot-sized cup with about a centimetre left for milk, which might be supplied in those sachets, where you tear off the end, causing some of the contents to splatter over your jacket. You dribble the remainder into the cup, but it’s not enough, so you brace yourself for another splatter.
I think most train-users are mentally back in the pre-dining car days when people carried their own provisions onto trains. The first British dining car, incidentally, is said to have been introduced by the Great Northern Railway in 1879, but they were slow to catch on, since most early carriages were not gangwayed: you couldn’t walk along a train. Today, all trains are gangwayed, but the gangways usually don’t lead anywhere interesting, only to the next carriage.
The standard self-catering arrangement used to be the luncheon basket. In The Railways: Nation, Network and People, Simon Bradley pinpoints the origin of these to Trent – ‘a strange junction station’ opened in 1862 between Derby and Nottingham –where, in 1871, the go-ahead railway caterers, Spiers & Pond, offered luncheon baskets containing half a chicken, ham, bread and butter, cheese and a half-pint bottle of claret or stout. The baskets came with crockery and cutlery included, and these were often stolen, despite being engraved with the railway company’s name.
Bradley writes that ‘Time was finally called on the basket system in 1941, as a wartime economy’, which is a shame, since the contents seem to have been delicious, especially those half pints or (the first-class norm) pints of wine. The re-introduction of pints of wine is supposed to have been one of the benefits of Brexit, but this appears mythical. If shops near stations sold them, I would buy them, because it would be slightly less embarrassing to unveil a pint of wine on a train than a 750 ml bottle. Believe it or not, I have only once drunk an entire bottle of wine on a train. I was travelling, seated, on the Caledonian Sleeper, and I thought it would help me sleep. It did, when supplemented with several Neurofen, and I had to be woken by a fellow passenger at Euston, with the incriminating empty bottle, and ripped-open pill packet on the table in front of me.
I usually go for 250ml bottles, ideally of M&S white. One-glass bottles like these were introduced to Britain, I believe, by the Southern Railway, on the Golden Arrow, whose passengers wanted something to drink before the potentially turbulent Channel-crossing, but not too much. One such bottle, with an M&S pork pie, a hard-boiled egg, a pink apple, a bit of cheese, nuts, a Fry’s Chocolate Cream and a small amount of mineral water or black coffee, makes a good luncheon basket-like train meal. M&S is my go-to for railway food, and I once met a man on the Sud Express sleeper from Hendaye to Lisbon, who told me that ‘The key to a good night train journey is a big Marks & Spencer’s salad.’ (He had bought his from the M&S at Gare Montparnasse, prior to boarding the TGV to Hendaye.)
I got the idea of the pork pie from watching a glamorous woman setting out her supper one evening on the East Coast Main Line. She also had a quarter bottle of wine, a satsuma and a bar of Cadbury’s Wholenut. She had removed the lid of her glass food container on the approach to Peterborough; she began very fastidiously eating immediately after departure, so she was highly self-controlled, like those cinema goers who put a sweet into their mouths exactly when the film’s opening credits begin.
My boiled egg was inspired by Marcel Proust who, in the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, wrote that ‘Sunrises are a feature of long train journeys, like hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers with boats straining forward but making no progress.’ I smear the egg with celery salt before wrapping it in foil.
The most anally retentive instance of train self-catering that I’ve seen occurred on the Nordland Railway (Trondheim to Bodo). The man sitting across from me, who had boarded the train along with a bike bedecked with panniers, had forsaken the dining car on that train in favour of a meal eaten from a green Perspex compartmentalised tray. Rectangles of various sizes contained carrots and peppers cut into batons, hummus, cheese, everything fitting perfectly in its allotted space, including a bar of Norwegian chocolate which he must have bought because it had the same dimensions as a slot on his smorgasbord. He washed this down with water (I assume) from a complicated canteen or canister whose lid he didn’t so much unscrew as unlock.
But he turned out to be a very nice guy, unlike the two self-caterers I encountered in 2015 on the Train Bleu, as I still call the sleeper between Paris and Nice, whose restaurant car was amputated in 2007. Alone in a couchette compartment, I was sipping a can of Heineken bought at Gare d’Austerlitz and watching the dark Parisian suburbs recede when a French couple entered. The man immediately closed the blind, then lay down on the bottom bunk opposite me; his wife climbed into the top bunk. They began jointly eating a picnic. Clearly, they had his ‘n’ hers sandwiches, and the man would verify the contents by peeling back the top slice a little way before passing the right ones up to his wife. She in turn would hand down the crisp bag, having taken a few herself, and this mechanical alternation went on for half an hour. They then both read for another half hour, at the end of which the man turned out the overhead light without asking my permission and they both went promptly to sleep (which I did not).
I had some pleasanter railway catering experiences on a trip to Genoa this week. In the colourful and friendly café at the Santa Margherita Ligure station, from where buses run to Portofino (which is too posh to have a station), I bought a bottle of mineral water and an apple. While washing the apple under a cold tap, the woman at the counter asked whether I would be taking it onto the train. When I said ‘No, I’ll eat it here,’ she put it upside down on a plate (for greater stability, I suppose) and placed a serrated knife alongside it.
It occurred to me as I ate the apple that what I need for future trains is a Swiss Army Knife, with corkscrew, serrated blade (because apples do taste nicer when cut up) and of course the toothpick, for post-prandial probing, which, if done with sufficient vigour, should have another benefit: that of keeping the seat beside me empty.
Greatest invention in BR history- the Griddle car on fast electric Clacton units. Perfect for pissed stockbrokers heading back to the Essex Coast. Not enough time for a full restaurant meal, but fried rump steaks, fried eggs and bacon etc all cooked on the spot in the little kitchen was superb. Helped them not to fall over the cat when dropping the front door key in the flowerpots when trying to get in the house. Saved marriages. Soaked it up.