* The world’s first true dining car was pioneered in the United States by George Mortimer Pullman in 1868. It was named Delmonico after the famous New York restaurant.
* The first British restaurant car ran on 1 November 1879 when a Pullman car named Prince of Wales was attached to a service from Leeds to King’s Cross. Passengers reclined in velvet armchairs and rang electric bells, summoning waiters bearing trays carrying roast meats, fish, puddings and fruit, with crystal decanters of wine.
* Queen Victoria was an early fan of rail travel but insisted that her train ran at no more than 40mph and that it stopped at selected stations whenever she wanted to eat. However she enjoyed a cup of tea on the move and her personal carriage, built in 1869, had tea-making equipment installed.
* Travellers on the London to Edinburgh Flying Scotsman in 1928 – at the time the longest non-stop run in the world – took their choice of three restaurant cars, a cocktail bar, a retiring room for ladies, a hairdresser and a barber’s shop.
* The GWR didn’t launch dining cars until 1890 because Brunel signed a lease giving exclusive rights to the owners of the station buffet at Swindon. But he regretted it, complaining that the coffee tasted like roasted corn and wrote to the manager in 1842: “I have long ceased making complaints at Swindon. I avoid taking anything there when I can help it.”
* One of the sexiest scenes ever in the cinema is in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, where Cary Grant seduces Eva Marie Saint as they select from the menu in the dining car of the 20th Century Limited. Running from New York to Chicago, this was one of America’s great luxury trains.
* Oscar for the fastest dining car meal goes to Michael Caine, playing gangster Jack Carter, who guzzles a bowl of railway soup in the opening scenes of the 1971 film Get Carter, aboard a British Rail service to Newcastle.
* Waiters in the early days were reputedly trained by being blindfolded and asked to walk along a white line down the middle of a sealed dining car while the train was moving at speed.
* During the second world war it was not unknown for dining car staff to put gravy browning in the coffee and to dilute beers for American servicemen, hoping they wouldn’t notice the difference.
* In the last years of the Brighton Belle at the end of the 1960s, the kippers cost 11p each. They were a favourite of actor Lord Olivier who protested when British Rail tried to withdraw them. At the time, steak, chips and peas aboard the train cost 95p.
