Normally, you might have expected a bit of anxiety among the passengers when smoke started to waft through a packed carriage on the 19.00 East Coast service from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. But when it happened last Friday, it was quite the opposite.
The aroma, emanating from the galley in coach No. 11998 was a signal for euphoria and sadness. The reason? Chef Stephen Naisby was loading a batch of sizzling rib-eye steaks on the grill aboard the last ever restaurant service on the East Coast Main Line, bringing to an end a great era of railway history.
This was the route where the Great Northern Railway pioneered idea of rail dining in Britain. Back then the passengers aboard Pullman car Prince of Wales, attached to the Leeds train, according to contemporary reports, “dined at their leisure with a choice of dishes from a bill of fare including soups, fish, entrees, roast joints, puddings and fruit for dessert”.
Fast forward 132 years, and the fare served up by Crew Leader Alistair Barclay and his team last Friday {May 20] was just as splendid. My freshly cooked Smoked Haddock Arnold Bennett Crepe was crisp, and huge rib eye of steak, topped with fried onions flavoured with Madeira wine, was cooked to a tee. And this was no special valedictory repast, cooked for the occasion. It was all from the standard East Coast Autumn-Winter menu that was replaced this week by a trolley service of at-seat inclusive snacks, available to first class passengers only.
The demise of railway dining has happened very quickly. At the end of the BR era, there were 249 trains a day with dining cars open to both first and standard-class passengers. At the start of privatisation, there were more than 80 on the GNER alone. From the new timetable which began this week [May 22}, there are just four, operated by First Great Western on trains to Devon and Cornwall.
As if in tribute, the evening sun shone as the train flashed through the eastern counties, and Crew Leader Barclay, along with members of his team of eight, raced through the coach balancing steaming plates and “silver service” salvers. Many of the passengers were regulars saying goodbye. Also on board was a group of railway industry grandees, attired in full evening wear – as one of them put it, “to carry out the mourning suitably dressed”.
There has always been a magic about dining on trains, eloquently summed up by the railway writer Geoffrey Kitchenside; “Eating on a train can be one of life’s most enjoyable experiences,” he wrote in 1979, “with good food well served and a constantly changing panorama as the scenery unfolds before you. Breakfast with dawn breaking over a misty river valley transcends even the finest paintings in the best-know art galleries, while no seascape on canvas could match luncheon on the Cornish Riviera Express as it ran beside the beach between Dawlish and Teignmouth, while dinner on the Midday Scot climbing over the southern uplands of Scotland in the falling light evoked far-great memories than any sun-sinking-slowly-in-the-west travelogue.”
As the final East Coast train sped through Peterborough, there was much talk about memorable meals eaten aboard trains. No-one in the dining car was old enough to recall what was probably the finest-ever combination of fine dining and speed – aboard the Silver Jubilee from London to Edinburgh in 1938, where the luncheon menu offered four courses including soup, grilled lemon sole tartare, roast mutton with redcurrant jelly, braised steak and cold pickled pork, followed by date pudding or charlotte russe.
But even relatively recently it was possible for hungry travellers to find a decent meal on a train. In the 1960s BR reinvented train dining with its diesel “Blue Pullmans” to Manchester, Birmingham and South Wales (although rough-riding meant you might end up with a bowl of consommé in your lap). And until the beginning of the 1970s, it was still possible to wolf down steak, chips and peas in the short time frame of the Brighton Belle’s one-hour journey to the coast.
Then there were “griddle cars”, which kept freshly cooked food going on many secondary lines. I recall eating the “Tartan Platter” – Aberdeen Angus entrecote, with fried egg, grilled tomato with roll and butter – on a slow train rolling on a Sunday evening along the Highland main line from Perth to Inverness. Even at the end of the 1970s, the unjustly maligned Travellers Fare was offering freshly prepared steak and kidney pie with mushrooms as standard fare on restaurant cars.
But the big revival came with privatisation. While Virgin, (naturally) settled for airline-style food, Christopher Garnett’s GNER opted for fine dining, with menus supervised by the McCoy brothers, from the award-winning Tontine restaurant in North Yorkshire At the same time the Lowestoft kippers aboard Anglia’s all-day restaurant cars to Norwich were legendary, until they were finally axed by National Express in 2008.
The GNER influence was clearly still at work as our 19.00 from King’s Cross, pulled into Newark North Gate, and the staff busied serving the final entrees, which also included fillets of trout, pan-fried on top of Jerusalem artichoke, along with roast leg of lamb and Yorkshire pudding and mint sauce.
In a corner of the coach East Coast spokesman John Gelson spelt out the virtues of the new trolley service, where all first class passengers will be delivered a free meal at their seat. “We’ve got an established reputation for good food and service and I can assure you we’re going to rise to the challenge!”
Some of the long-serving, mostly northern-based, staff were wistful, nevertheless. “I’ll really miss the regulars,” said customer service assistant Joanne Cooper from Wallsend. “They’re such a friendly bunch,” said her colleague Donna Stanway from Yeadon, Leeds. There was a bigger wrench for Phil Corcoran who was wearing his “Restaurant Host” shirt badge for the last time. “Sadly, I won’t be keeping my badge or my title. From now on, I’m going to be called a ‘service assistant’. It’s a bit like being relegated from the Premier League, but at least I’ll be keeping my pay!”
As the brakes came on for the approach to York, where the very “final call for the dining car” would be made on the next leg of the journey to Darlington, one of the regular passengers rose to raise a spontaneous toast to the staff. “There are three great things about the restaurant cars on this line, he said. “One is the sight of the staff doing the balancing act with their bowls. The second is the fact that you can have a lovely meal on the way home without having to do the washing up. And the third is the quality of the after-dinner mints.”
The passenger, David Cross, told me afterwards that he had long been a standard class regular in the 19.00 dining cars, but was sorry he would no longer be able to get a meal of the same quality since he couldn’t pay for a first class ticket.
But there was cheering news to follow. Although there was one King’s Cross dining departure after ours – the 17.33 to Leeds – the sittings on that train finished at Doncaster. So Alistair, Stephen, Donna and Joanne and the other members of the Newcastle-based team enter the record books for the very final meal on the line that invented the dining car
Of course, the days of railway dining car won’t quite be history yet. The flag will still be flown by first Great Western’s four West Country trains to Plymouth and Penzance. David Lennox, FGW’s head of catering, told me he still believes that a quality meal on a train is a unique selling point for British travellers with their special love of the railways. Personally, I believe he is right.
But with FGW handing back the keys to the franchise, who knows whether we will see the like of it again. Last word to National Railway Museum’s chief, Steve Davies, who strode off along the platform at York, clutching the menu from the last train, which all the crew had signed to place alongside the menu from the first train, already in the museum.
“You know, we British are very good at reinventing things. We might not be surprised if we didn’t suddenly rediscover the idea of the restaurant cars one day…”
‘On the Slow Train Again: Twelve more great British train journeys’ has just been published by Preface, price £14.99. The updated paperback version of the companion volume ‘On the Slow Train’ is newly reissued by Arrow, price £7.99
