As from today there will be no more bacon-and-sausage baps for sale on the trains from London Marylebone to Banbury and Birmingham; no more ploughman’s sandwiches or cheese-and-onion crisps; neither hot drinks nor cold. Chiltern Railways, which operates the service, is the latest train operator to abolish onboard catering. Most travellers now bring their food and drink with them in little paper carrier bags from station cafes and takeaways. A need has vanished. “The service is no longer sustainable,” says a statement from Chiltern.
I find it hard to think that much will be missed. What “onboard catering” meant latterly for Chiltern was a trolley pushed laboriously up and down the train by a hard-pressed steward who handed out snacks, poured hot water on teabags and patiently gave change to customers who offered £20 notes. Other train companies persist with the same model, and sometimes, sipping tea from my big paper cup or brushing muffin crumbs from my shirtfront, I think back to the first time I ever ate food that had been prepared and bought on a train, which was in the days when head waiters walked briskly down the carriage corridor calling: “First sitting for lunch!”
It was the summer of 1956. We were travelling by the morning express from Edinburgh to Aberdeen, and my father had decided on a treat. Just before we crossed the Tay we took our seats in the restaurant car, where a uniformed waiter brought us plates of haddock and chips. A shaft of the midday sun lit the white tablecloth and glittered on the cutlery, and on the other side of the window gave a silver burnish to the sea. The haddock lay golden in its coat of breadcrumbs, decorated with a lemon slice and some unfamiliar pale sauce, identified much later in life as tartare. It was utterly delicious; better by far than anything out of our local chip shop – perhaps even tastier than the kind my mother cooked. Ice-cream and tinned fruit salad followed. The last morsels had gone long before we reached Montrose.
I can remember few other childhood meals as fondly, and none so exactly. The combination of eating luxuriously and watching the scenery unfold – unfamiliar scenery in this case, at least beyond Kirkcaldy – was exhilarating. I imagine it was the same for the passengers who filled the first British restaurant car, which began its run between King’s Cross and Leeds in 1879: tucking into roast lamb as you were dashing at a mile a minute through Grantham – the jolt at the points, the waiter hovering unsteadily with the sauce boat – must have seemed everything God hadn’t intended, like swimming the breaststroke while smoking a pipe.
Restaurant cars caught on everywhere. Sometimes distance made them more than sensible: the Imperial Mail’s journey from Bombay to Calcutta, for example, lasted long enough for a newly arrived civil servant to enjoy two breakfasts, two lunches and two dinners while viewing the less well-fed of rural India from a seated position beneath a ceiling fan; the far greater width of North America might multiply that number of meals by two. But for other routes – the hour-long journey from London of the Brighton Belle is a prime example – they amounted to no more than a metropolitan indulgence: a kipper to start the commuter’s day and a Welsh rarebit to end it.
At first, they were a privilege accorded only to first-class passengers, leaving the lower classes to feed in the refreshment rooms that had been a feature of the larger stations almost since the railways began. Before restaurant cars came along, a long-distance train would echo its stagecoach predecessor and stop on the journey so that its passengers could eat. Some of these stops became well known. Trains between London and Scotland, for instance, usually halted for lunch at Preston, York or Normanton (there were three rival routes), where travellers taking the prix fixe menu were expected to scoff six courses in the 20 minutes before the locomotive sounded its whistle and the guard waved his flag.
By no means all railway refreshment rooms were as plain and comfortless as Giles cartoons and films such as Brief Encounter suggest. Stylish tearooms opened in London terminuses and in cities such as Aberdeen and Glasgow, even though restaurant cars had creamed off some of their superior custom. But a reputation for poor food that had begun as early as the 1840s proved impossible to overcome. Charles Dickens in his Mugby Junction stories was guying “the British Refreshment sangwich” and its sawdust filling in 1866, and jokes about its staleness became a regular feature of Punch in the 1890s.
Its comic heyday, however, arrived after the railways were taken into public ownership in 1948, when the “railway sandwich” became politicised as the “British Railways sandwich”. It lay there with its curling corners in the buffet’s display cabinet like an evidential exhibit of everything the Conservative press believed was wrong with the state.
Like “Brussels” some time later, “nationalisation” in the 1950s was a dirty word for papers such as the Mail, Express, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Post. If the state as a whole could be condemned for its “busybodies” and “snoopers”, the railways occupied a special position as the source of heavy financial losses and the home of the unhelpful and incompetent staff: the consequence of socialism, you see. In fact, British Railways (later British Rail) suffered mainly from the wavering commitment of successive governments and, eventually, punitive underinvestment, but the media’s persistent background noise did permanent damage. This week, reacting to Labour’s manifesto commitment to renationalisation, Tory MPs ritualistically referred to “the bad old days of British Rail”.
Were they? Trains were far fewer and rather slower, but also more comfortable. Government subsidies were smaller and fares lower. The headline “More bank holiday rail chaos” was less frequent. Improvements such as electrification and resignalling, when they could be afforded, were accomplished cheaply and usually on time. Nearly every locomotive, passenger carriage and freight wagon was made in this country. The present reality – freight locomotives from North America, passenger trains assembled from kits made in Italy and Japan – would have seemed inconceivable only 25 years ago, as would European state railway companies running the trains to Banbury and Aberdeen.
It would be a mistake to take the restaurant car as any guide to performance. Their total came to 250 when the railways were privatised, but now any kind of onboard cooking beyond the toaster and microwave is confined to a few trains between London and Swansea or Penzance. To have eaten a fried breakfast while travelling up the side of Loch Lomond or an early dinner on the climb to Shap means you’re of a certain age.
I once had tea on the Golden Arrow – a silver-plated sugar basin stamped with the insignia of the Pullman Car Company sits on my shelf to prove it. Looking at it now, I remember a conversation with a steward on one of its last trips from London Victoria to the docks at Dover. On the way back, he told me that the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, had often returned this way from his excursions to the continent. “And when he did,” the steward said, “I would have to go with him to the lavatory and help him change his shirt. Now, sir, a little more Dundee cake?”
