If you’ve ever been stuck with a smooshed muffin or plastic-entombed sandwich from an Amtrak cafe car — or more likely, found the car closed entirely for the duration of an hours-long journey — you’ll understand why. Though Amtrak has made some advances in recent years with its dining car and offers meals curated by chef Stephen Starr in first class, those are restricted to certain ticket holders and often expensive. The vast majority of Americans end up in coach with access only to the cafe car, where the food options can be despiriting; no wonder they prefer to fly, which is why air traffic outweighs train traffic in this country many times over.
We’re a nation of flyers — but we don’t have to be. The Biden administration’s big Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) from 2021 allocated $66 billion to improving Amtrak (more federal funding than Amtrak had received in the previous 50 years since its creation). Much of that money is going toward new Airo train cars, rolling onto lines starting with the Cascadia region next year, as well as maintenance on bridges, tunnels, stations, railyards, and so on.
As part of the IIJA funding, Amtrak had to establish a Food and Beverage Working Group, composed of service workers, passenger advocates, Amtrak representatives, and state partners; the group audited Amtrak’s food offerings and submitted a report to Congress last year suggesting changes. In January, Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen, who represents much of Memphis and sits on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, doubled down on that report by introducing two bills, the Train Furtherance of Outstanding Onboard Dining Act (Train FOOD Act) and the Train Establishment of Appetizing Table Service Act (Train EATS Act) — don’t you just love congressional acronyms? — requiring periodic reports from Amtrak (and the Government Accountability Office) on how the food improvement process is going.
“Many of us recall the civility and elegance of a meal in a train dining car,” Cohen said in a statement. “For too long, those days have been a thing of the past. But attracting passengers back to passenger train travel requires more than on-time service and a sandwich in a plastic carton. My Train FOOD and Train EATS bills will restore the service the public once expected and still deserves.”
Taken together, the government initiatives could help make train travel a little more palatable. Beyond a general upgrade to food quality, they would require coach passengers to have access to sit-down dining of some kind, allow customers to pre-order meals, improve sustainability and waste processes, provide more affordable meals, improve Amtrak’s collaboration with supplier Aramark, and create a rapid development process for introducing new food items.
There is no reason we can’t have nice trains with great food. Trains are bigger than planes, providing more room for preparing meals. There aren’t as many security hindrances. There are intermittent stops allowing kitchens to restock. After a pandemic dip, there’s growing customer demand. And it could be a bipartisan effort, uniting everyone from “Amtrak Joe” to conservative populists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just posted about her train trip to Georgia, to Ezra Klein-style Abundance Democrats with their high-speed rail. The IIJA even did away with vague language in Amtrak’s mission about profitability, replacing it with language about better serving customers, including “offering food service that meets the needs of its customers.”
Trains once changed the shape of America. They could do so again, if there’s something decent to eat on the way.
What’s your train travel meal strategy? What would you like to see the dining car serve? Let us know at newsletters@eater.com.
