Originally Posted by
dilanesp
My guess is (1) the Acela is logistically far easier to cater, because it is a day train that runs through a bunch of heavy population centers, and (2) Acela FC ticket prices are a huge profit center, whereas long distance tickets are sold at a significant loss.
The fundamental economic problem for dining on the eastern long distance trains is that the schedules are too short to make up for the overnight hours when the diner is closed, even though it still incurs costs overnight. The LSL's diner was barely open longer than it was closed, and the same goes for the Capitol Limited. That increases the fixed cost allocation to the diner, which means that the menu prices are too outrageous to get coach pax to pay and allocating the costs to sleeper pax destroys the sleeper economics.
If anything, the long day trains (Vermonter, Carolinian, Pennsylvanian, Palmetto) could probably make a full diner work better than the overnight trains with shorter than 24 hour runtimes.