There was a legend, back in the eighties when the Santa Fe Railroad was forging westward through Kansas and Colorado, a legend quite naturally not discouraged by the railroad itself, to the effect that the great Fred Harvey, legendary restaurateur of the Southwest, once discharged an eating-house manager for not showing a sufficient monthly operating deficit in his accounts. Nothing was then too good for the patrons, as yet uneducated in the refinements of eating, of the restaurants which Harvey, with pioneer determination, was setting up along the Santa Fe's main line, and if new premises didn't show a loss to begin with, he felt he wasn't getting full promotional value out of the fine food, English cutlery, an polite dining-room manners which he was bringing, for the first time, into a new country.
Whatever the internal financial economy of the dining cars and restaurants along the way as of the present generation may be, it is a matter between the railroad and Mr. Byron Harvey.
Certainly it is difficult to imagine how such superbly provisioned and adroitly administered de luxe commissaries on wheels can show much profit, but the promotional value to the Harvey System and the Santa Fe Railroad is just as great in 1948 as it was when Fre Harvey brought the first table linen to Dodge City and started making the cow hands put on jackets before they could sit down in his dining rooms.
This department had the opportunity, a few weeks ago, of making the initial run of the now daily “Super Chief” on the thirty-nine-and-a-half-hour super luxury haul between Chicago and Los Angeles, and the chances are that even the original Fred Harvey would be amazed, even gratified, at the way his legend is maintained after more than half a century as part of the saga of Western Americana.
It used to be remarked in worldly circles that, in the spacious days of trans Atlantic travel on the superb liners whose names are now history—the “Olympic,” “Berengaria,” “Rotterdam,” and “Empress of Britain”—a week spent crossing the ocean in that generation of wealth and manners was more of an education than a year at the best university. For the perceptive intelligence there was available between the North River and Southampton or Cherbourg more instruction in the way of the world, in eating, wines, clothes, languages, goo manners, and generally cultivated deportment than could be absorbed through any other medium in a far greater term of time.
That, of course, was in a time when Europe existed and there was an England.Perhaps today the closest equivalent to this liberal instruction is available in railroad travel on the transcontinental main lines of the United States an Canada, with possible extension courses in Mexico, and of the available sources of worldly savoir-faire none is more urbane than the Santa Fe. A train trip from coast to coast aboard, say, the “Twentieth Century Limited” and the “Super Chief” is a liberal education, not only in history and geography, but in the uses of sophisticated maturity. The only defect lies in its brevity.
There is an article in the American credo which nominates as an article of faith that “real railroading” begins only west of Chicago, and, while there are some notable exceptions to this spacious generality, there is enough truth in it to make it valid and worth consideration. The aforementioned “Century” on the New York-Chicago run is certainly an exception. So is the conduct of many of the diners of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and so are some of the fine new trains to Florida and the Deep South of the Seaboard Railway. But, by and large, railroading in the grand manner and spacious tradition begins on the far side of the Mississippi, and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe is, to the minds of thousands and thousands of experienced travelers, just about its foremost practitioner.
Not that the Santa Fe is anything so simple, if the word may be used to describe the incredible complexity of modern railroad operations, as a mere steel via structure between Chicago and the Far West, maintaining over its economy a system of freight and passenger conveyances. It is an empire in some places, as in Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, hundreds of miles wide, whose main line alone is 2,250 miles long and whose branches, contributaries, and contingent resources constitute many other thousands of miles of rails. The empire within these limits lives or dies by the rail-road; its wheat, cattle, petroleum, an manufactories exist or don't exist by virtue of the Santa Fe, but that is not the concern of this dispatch.
Readers of GOURMET are primarily interested in the Santa Fe as a super de luxe agency for achieving the great American Southwest with a maximum of assurance and comfort and a minimum of delay,and in this capacity it functions as no other railroad has ever functioned in all the record of the flanged wheel upon the steel rail. And if the Santa Fe is the greatest purveyor of retail luxury, circumstance, and dispatch of overland travel in the region it serves, then the “Super Chief” and, only to a slightly lesser degree, the “Chief” are the most glittering and world-famous showcases for its costly merchandise. Neither Van Cleef and Arpels nor Cartier is more knowing in the display of its stock in trade.
The “Super Chief” is, and always has been in the decade of its widely heralded existence, a sort of combination Plaza, Ritz-Carlton, and San Francisco Palace of railroad trains, at once expensive, conservative, opulent, and dashing. Its overtones are those of morning-coated maîtres d'hôtel, sports clothes from Bullock's-Wilshire, French governesses with well-mannered, nonscreaming issue in their charge, and mounds of luggage from hardly anybody but Mark Cross and Louis Vuitton. Orchids are a requirement when boarding the “Super Chief” in Chicago, and station wagons with liveried attendants are essential to descending from its drawing rooms at Pasadena, and the travelers who appear in its lounges and restaurant cars are the ones you came out with on the “Century,” who lunched at the door tables at the Pump Room on the way through Chicago, and who will go directly to the Town House on their arrival in Los Angeles.
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