Originally Posted by
jackal
Were your plastic plates and inedible food on the Starlight or another route?
Amtrak experimented a few years ago with some dining car cutbacks on some routes. The Starlight (as one of Amtrak's flagship routes) wasn't touched, AFAIK, though, so if you had bad food there, it was hopefully just a fluke
I can't remember the route where the food was terrible. One of the long distance runs out of NY, maybe to New Orleans. We booked only to Virginia just to enjoy the dining car since the Starlight had been so great and rather than being cooked to order it was like airplane food, reheated and on plastic.
My memory was that the Starlight and all the long distance runs except the EB had been downgraded in this way. Since eating a real cooked to order meal on wheels was such a treat I was thinking that if Seattle going east was the only run left we'd go try it. My younger son loves trains and a run to Glacier is close enough that its a cheap treat even if we need to go to SEA first.
What I didn't want to do was go to all that trouble just for another meal like the last one. Not worth it. Hence my question about whether the meal service on the EB really is unique in the whole Amtrak system the way I was told it is.