An Early Dinner

Hungry now?

There was a time when dining car chefs on railroad trains around the world served millions of meals to hungry passengers every day. Often sharing regional specialities that made use of ingredients from along the route through which these trains passed. Yet as times changed, so did passenger tastes.

This meal was one created to lure the budget-minded passengers to make use of the fulling dining car rather than skip meals all together. The Early Dinner offered a full meal at an attractive price. In this case on the second night out aboard the famed California Zephyr, as it traveled across Colorado on the rails of the Denver & Rio Grande,, either east or west bound. Even then, the price of one dollar and twenty five cents per person was indeed a bargain for a meal freshly prepared by the chef’s aboard the train between San Francisco and Chicago.