Contrary to a widely accepted legend, not every passenger on either the “Chief” or “Super Chief” is Jack Warner or Joan Crawford, and if there are film folk aboard, they are on their best behavior and no Hollywood manners. The Santa Fe has some regard for the appearance and conduct of its trains. There are, however, very apt to be fashion designers and style scouts in numbers, awash with everything which was at the Colony last week and will be on view at Mike Romanoff's tomorrow noon.
The Harvey service in the diners, which are part of the all-new equipment of the daily “Super Chief,” comprises the pick of available stewards an waiters and a cuisine which is, quite rightly, the wonder and glory of all American railroading. Possibly, back in the seventies and eighties when diner menus were positively upholstered with antelope steak, canvasback, and prairie hen, bills of fare were more comprehensive, but as it is they are enough to bug the eyes of travelers accustomed to the indifferent selections available aboar anything but the most exceptional extrafare runs in the East. The Santa Fe maintains its own trout farms in Colorado, the Harvey System buys the pick of the heavy beef for its cars and hotels in the markets at Denver and Kansas City, and such California matters as fresh figs in season, strawberries out of season, grapefruit at all seasons, artichokes, asparagus, and avocados are simply taken for granted and tossed in along with more substantial affairs as a matter of course. The wine list on all Santa Fe trains makes a feature, quite understandably, of California wines, an on both the eastbound “Chief” an “Super Chief” there are available limite quantities of Sierra cheese, another California product famous with cheese fanciers the world over, but only infrequently obtainable elsewhere.
Probably there is no circumstance in which breakfast, that all too much neglected American meal, is more agreeable than aboard a train, and on any train, such as the Santa Fe's flagships, which traverses a mountain terrain with spectacular views at every turn of the right of way, it can be as important as dinner, both esthetically and practically. Breakfast in the West is better anyway, where the preposterous proposition that a man can live until luncheon on coffee and Melba toast has never made any headway at all, and most railroad menus feature, as God intended they should, steak, liver, chops, and a variety of fish in addition to the conventional arrangement of eggs and pig products. Late breakfast can be had aboard the westbound “Super Chief,” as the train makes the grade into the Raton Pass, and passing above Uncle Dick Wootan's historic ranch a few miles southwest of Trinida is as good a place in the world as this department knows to have a rare break-fast steak flanked by an ample stack of little thin hot cakes assisted by a Niagara of good, black Harvey coffee.
In passing, it would seem worth the mention that, although you may imagine that every convenience available to the contriving of the Pullman Standar Steel Car Company has already been incorporated in the compartment cars of your recent experience, the geniuses of that firm have now evolved a new an spatterproof washstand and an adjustable, individual station-selection radio in every room in the train. In admiring any sort of mechanical music box, this department is, perhaps, taking leave of what good sense it may have possesse in the past, but this one seems foolproof in that it is wholly governed by the preferences of the individual passenger both as to volume and subject matter. The gadget is even so cunningly devised that it is automatically cut out when the corridor door is opened so as not to be offensive to the neighbors, a device which somehow strikes us as a milestone in the developments of wireless and melodeon technique.
Because of the multiple enchantments of the regions adjacent to the Santa Fe's high iron as well as the universally admired practices of its still romantic function as a railroad, this department coul continue almost indefinitely in a Santa-Fe-I-Love-You vein, but perhaps this chronicle of the mobile wonderments it embraces will suffice. Many years before Cyrus Halliday ever dreamed of a rail-road out of Kansas into the Southwest over what, before it became the Santa Fe Trail, was universally known as the Mexican Trace, and before the railroa wars secured for the Santa Fe the crossing into New Mexico over the Raton, William Hazlitt wrote: “One of the pleasantest things in life is to go on a journey.” The only thing that diminishes the delight of a journey over the Santa Fe is that, no matter how far you may go over its rails, the time so occupied is invariably too brief.
If it is recalled on the credit side of the dramatic ledger for very little else, the theater season of 1947-48 will be remembered as the pleasant time when things Victorian and Edwardian had an edge over any and all other settings for period-design plays and when New York was treated to such a profusion of vintage motorcars, Prince Albert coats, chatelaine watches, and tufte white silk upholstered sofas as haven't been confected in an old dog's age.
Entrants in this highly agreeable an atmospheric turn-of-the-century sweep stakes have included The Importance of Being Earnest, John Gielgud's wonderfully successful revival of the fragile manners of Oscar Wilde, a completely photogenic revival of Shaw's Man an Superman with all its 1910 properties intact and provocative, The Winslow Boy, a serious drama concerning a naval scandal in England almost a half century ago, High Button Shoes, which concerns itself with Mack Sennett an the Model T Ford and was confecte by GOURMET's own Stephen Longstreet, and, last but most magnificent, Strange Bedfellows, which is both a sumptuous and hilarious picture of senatorial life on San Francisco's Nob Hill at that ineffable period of history: the decade which preceded the earthquake and fire of 1906.
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