Many years ago, I worked in a passenger service centre for CN reserving
space for customers. That experience vividly showed me how it was nearly
impossible to have 100% occupancy of sleeping car space in a long haul
transcontinental train. For example, passengers getting off a train at a
large number of stations can never be perfectly matched with passenger
boarding at those stations. As a result, a significant percentage of
sleeping space went empty for much of the trip. CN at the time had a
fairly sophisticated computer reservation system that made it much easier
to optimally fill the train than the prior manual space allocation system
that CP used until folded into VIA. Under the manual space allocation
system, major stations were assigned blocks of space in each train.
Calgary might for instance have 5 compartments for each westbound
departure of a particular train to Toronto. If a passenger reserved a
compartment from Calgary to Fort William, that compartment would probably
remain empty for the remainder of the trip to Toronto as other major
stations would not have insight into space not used by Calgary. While
there were some workarounds such as sending telegrams across the system
seeking unused space from other major stations, this was very cumbersome
and time consuming in a manual system. Suffice it to say that rarely would
all sleeping car space on a particular long haul train be occupied for the
entire trip. As a result, I would assume that diner capacity on a
transcontinental train in the fifties could safely be something less than
theoretical sleeping car capacity.
Having noted the above, there were and are a few exceptions to the general
rule. First of all special movements such as tours could take all space
for a long distance. For instance a tour group going from Montreal to
Vancouver in three cars might use all available space in those cars. In
addition, something like the Grey Cup trains of yore would likely fill all
available space to the cup city for that year for a few days just prior to
the game and the reverse after the game. Today, the Canadian probably
carries a predominance of tourists in sleepers traveling for much if not
all of the route between Toronto and Vancouver so the Canadian is likely
closer to achieving 100% occupancy now than prior transcontinental trains
that catered more to a transportation market.
Paul
On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 1:43 PM Kaley Hoffman <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I was reading a book about the TCL and noted that in later years of
operation, there was an “A” series diner assigned to the train, with a
seating capacity of 36. The train would typically have 7 sleepers each
accommodating between 20-27 people each (R, S, G series). Assuming the
train was sold out, there would be between 140-180 people on the train, all
fed by a single diner. That equates to 4-5 sittings for each meal.
How would that have worked practically? Assuming each sitting took 45
minutes to an hour, it would be 3-5 hours for each meal. If you started
serving at 7 am, you might be done by 11 am, but that is a pretty late
lunch, and then it is straight into lunch. Dinner could start around 5 pm,
but would run to 9 or 10 at night?
In the plans for the tail car, there is a small buffet area, but doesn’t
look large enough to serve any significant numbers of people.
Am I missing something here? Any info would be greatly appreciated.
*KALEY HOFFMAN*
