March 22, 1907
“It’s like running a hotel with fifty dining rooms, flying all over the country.”
This is the way a veteran in the dining car service of a big railroad sought to describe his occupation. Even then he failed to give an adequate idea of the intricacies involved in keeping a collection of rolling restaurants up to the top notch of efficiency. Seventy thousand passengers are fed every month on the rolling cars of the Pennsylvania railroad alone. The monthly receipts amount to $65,000, and the amount of money spent on supplies to about $35,000, in the dining car crews there are 430 men.
About the management of a dining car there are complexities never dreamed of by the man whose tables stand over the same real estate all the times. Everything is under one’s thumb in one case – in the other everything is either leaving or coming toward one at forty, or sixty miles an hour. Property worth thousands of dollars has to be trusted to dozens of conductors and hundreds of waiters.
The crew of a dining car comprises a conductor, four cooks and five waiters. The conductor is the commander-in-chief whenever the car is on the road. For all the supplies, both of food and drink, he is held to strict accountability. If he loses track of so much as a bunch of celery or half a pound of cheese it is known twenty minutes after his car returns to the Waldo avenue yard in Jersey City.
A list of supplies issued one day recently by the storekeeper of one system to conductors include 209 varies of foods, drinks, cigars and cigarettes and miscellaneous supplies. Here are a few of the items on the list:
Four hundred and twenty pounds of chicken, 490 ribs of beef, 360 lemons, sixty-two plum puddings, 472 loaves of bread, 302 pounds of bluefish, ninety pounds of tenderloin steak, 234 pounds of butter, 360 pounds of sugar, 360 pounds of rock salt, fifteen bottles of Tabasco sauce, 168 cakes of soap, twenty-four boxes of matches, fifty quarts of wines and whiskies, fifty-eight pints of ale, twenty-seven packages of cigarettos, 150 cigars, twelve quarts of cranberries, 1,200 eggs, sixty pounds of flounders, 580 rolls, fifty bottles of cooking brandy, 150 quarts of cream, ninety-six pounds of coffee, thirty bottles of cooking sherry, 288 English muffins, 221 pints of beer, 270 quarts of milk, three packs of cards.
The success of the service depends upon a thorough system. If there is a flaw in the arrangements it will make trouble. The dining car superintendent has a corps of accountants who kept minute records. Vouchers for every cent that is spent are turned in to the superintendent’s office. In a card index are kept the names of all employes, past and present, and by referring to a book the seeker for information can learn whether an applicant for a job has ever been in the Pennsylvania dining car service before, and if so how he behaved himself and why he left. The list of supplies issued on any day of the year, their cost and to whom they were issued – all of this and more, can be found out in ten minutes.
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