Traveling Outside of Time
“Brian was one smart cat,” Willie tells me. “He had this train smokin’.” Willie is the onboard chef, although he prefers the humbler title of “cook.” An engaging man who could give Denzel a run for his money in the looks department, he has been a cook all his adult life and an Amtrak cook for more than ten years. Today, his forty-third birthday (a fact that has been circulating among the crew all morning, along with plans to surprise him with a cake), he will work a 17-hour shift down in the galley. Some of the food he and his crew will prepare from scratch – the salads, the breakfast egg dishes – but most of the lunch and dinner entrees come to him flash-frozen and vacuum-packed from Amtrak’s L.A. commissary. The quality is better than you would expect, although nothing like the unique meals on Brian’s train of yore.
Rosenwald’s regional menus are also, unfortunately, a thing of the past, discontinued in mid-2002 when yet more cost-cutting measures took away local autonomy from the trains. The Coast Starlight itself was doing fine. It was at least breaking even and, during high season (summer and holidays), it might have been turning a profit – if Amtrak figured profitability on a train-by-train basis. But that’s not the way the system works. The costs of operating the entire national railroad enterprise are spread across the system, which means that even though Rosenwald had made a success of the Starlight, the train could not reap the rewards.