Meals on wheels: How the railways transformed how we eat

On Saturday, November 1, 1879, the Wakefield Express printed an account of a ‘substantial luncheon’. ‘Glasses were filled with wine and placed on the tables, and not a drop was spilled,’ its correspondent reported, after detailing a menu of mutton cutlets, mashed potato and green peas, cold meats, cheese and celery. ‘Ordinary decanters and bottles betrayed no tendency to topple over into the laps of the guests, or plates to empty their contents on the carpet.’

Nothing newsworthy there, you might think — except that this particular lunch had taken place on a moving train. Following America’s lead, the Great Northern Railway had shipped over a Pullman dining car from Detroit, turned it into ‘a model of elegance and luxuriousness… the only one in England’ and launched it on its Leeds to London King’s Cross Route.

The passengers, who dined in easy-chairs upholstered in crimson velvet and designed for ‘perfect steadiness’, were wowed, as was the general public. A new era of dining on the go had arrived.

The railways had already been changing the way the country ate for decades. Following the introduction of the public steam railway in 1825, it became possible to get fresh produce to the other end of the country in a matter of hours, still in excellent saleable condition. The most famous testament to this is the Watercress Line, originally known as Mid-Hants Railway: now a heritage railway, it helped to turn Hampshire’s watercress beds into a viable commercial enterprise.

Livestock could now be transported by train to be slaughtered and butchered rather than having to make the journey on foot and London cooks and chefs were able to obtain the finest produce from around Britain with relative ease, courtesy of the capital’s booming food markets: Smithfield as we know it today opened in 1868 (connected by a huge underground depot and tunnels to the Great Western, Great Northern, Midland and London, Chatham and Dover Railways) and Billingsgate in 1850, before being expanded in 1873. Borough Market benefited greatly from being a cabbage’s throw from London’s first railway terminus, London Bridge, when it opened in 1836.

Despite concerns that eating on the move would prove injurious to passengers’ health, dining cars were a hit, appealing to the very British love of keeping up appearances under trying circumstances. By the 1920s, six-course feasts were being served to passengers dressed for dinner amid Art Deco splendour.

Preparing hundreds of meals each day on the move was a serious test of skill; cooks were hired from steamships and, according to one legend, waiters were trained by being made to walk in a straight line blindfolded. Menus between the wars were frequently lavish: a London, Midland and Scottish Railway menu from 1935 features halibut with shrimp sauce and roast lamb with two different kinds of potatoes. In the heyday of Betjeman’s Metroland, commuters on the Metropolitan Railway (now the London Underground’s Metropolitan Line) could avail themselves of a special dining car on the morning train, which would return in the evenings to serve dinner.

Things ground to a halt with the outbreak of the Second World War: all British dining cars were taken out of service. When they returned in October 1945, it was under rationing even stricter than that which had come before, together with restrictions on crockery, cutlery and table linens. Six courses became three, prime cuts were replaced by iffy pies. In 1949, the Southern Railway launched mock-Tudor ‘tavern cars’ to try to capitalise on Britons’ love of pubs, but these surreal oak-beamed affairs never caught on.

By the 1960s, foreign travel had siphoned off even more of the glamour from the railways, with Beeching’s closures diminishing them further. Motorways and supermarkets cheapened food distribution just as the railways had: London’s Somers Town Goods Yard, a once proud two-storey hub for fresh produce, closed in 1973 (the British Library now stands on its site). The dining car wheezed on, menus changing to reflect the times: in 1970, there was an outcry when it was announced that kippers would no longer be served on the Brighton line. Sir Laurence Olivier, who enjoyed them aboard the Brighton Belle, led a campaign to save them, which succeeded.

Then, of course, there was the British Rail sandwich, the Winter of Discontent in edible form. According to Alex Johnson, author of Menus That Made History, its antecedents weren’t much better, with Anthony Trollope declaring that ‘the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich’ in his 1869 novel He Knew He Was Right. Curling under domes, the 20th-century version was both bland and mean: according to a 1971 British Rail catering guide, fillings were to be ‘laid diagonally across the bread where the sandwich is to be cut’, with the aim of ‘improving the appearance’ of the sandwich (making it look better filled than it actually was, in other words).

Looking back on his time as a young man in 1970s England, Bill Bryson recalled that ‘you couldn’t buy a British Rail sandwich without wondering if this was your last act before a long period on a life-support machine’; Spike Milligan joked that van Gogh’s missing ear had turned up in one.

In the late 1990s, some 250 dining cars still served the now-privatised rail network, but they were found to be unprofitable and decommissioned one by one. This wasn’t the end of the story, however. When all of this was going on, Belmond, the luxury hospitality company, had been securing unwanted dining cars and restoring them. Today, Belmond British Pullman runs services during which passengers enjoy menus dreamed up by chefs such as L’Enclume’s Simon Rogan.

The starched tablecloths, burnished wood panelling and free-flowing Champagne all feel like return to the golden age of railway dining — and in a neat twist, several of the carriages currently in Pullman circulation were once part of the Brighton Belle, scene of Olivier’s kipper triumph