The great hotels of New York were run by courtly, mature men of the world like Simeon Ford and Albert Keller, but about the only running that can be expected of a generation of doubtless wellmeaning, but still half-baked, college children is into the ground.
It must be reported that when it is of a mind to entertain for promotional purposes or any other, the New York Central Railroad can put its best foot forward, or perhaps it should be its best brake shoe, with a graceful and generous gesture with the best of them. The most recent occasion for the Central's keeping open house was the inaugural of its new Henry Dreyfuss-styled twin units of the “Twentieth Century Limited” which will have been in regular overnight operation on the New York-Chicago run long before this typeset greets the eye of subscribers to GOURMET. It did it with vintage wine, mammoth steaks, and gold traveling clocks for souvenirs quite in the Diamond Jim Brady manner, and ran its guests up to Poughkeepsie and back with dinner en route beside a lyric Hudson River on a translucent autumn evening.
This department takes exception to several things in the conduct of the “Century,” but the most important one is that it makes its run on far too brief a schedule. The train isn't run for the pleasure of tourists or railroad fans or any clientele except a solid, gilt-edged group of hurried businessmen from Wall Street and the Loop, but this department knows from countless rides aboard it and conversation with many “Century” regulars that there are a lot of them who would just as soon have a couple of hours longer amidst its luxuries and conveniences. A four o'clock starting hour at the New York end would inconvenience nobody and give passengers on all but the shortest light days of the year the pleasure of a daylight ride up the Hudson.
In point of actual fact, the modern décor, the telephone service, the streamlining, and the complexities of plumbing on the “Century” are assets quite secondary to its fame as a beautifully conducted train which for forty-six years has carried the most continuously distinguished passenger list in the world. Its proprietors know pretty well that its greatest asset as a show window de luxe for the rail- road's over-all service is the enormous good will which it has been building up ever since the first run back in 1904 when John “Bet-You-a-Million” Gates prophesied at the New York end of the run that it would eventually make Chicago a suburb of Manhattan, and at the other end forecast that New York would eventually be a handy faubourg of Chicago.
The initial run of the new equipment on a westbound trip, in which your reporter happened to participate as a paying passenger, also had all the glamour and swank of an abbreviated ocean crossing aboard a crack luxury liner: expensive cut flowers, mounds of Louis Vuitton luggage, film celebrities, the speed guns of news photographers, and big names by the hampers. Life magazine was represented by a complete photographic and reportorial crew; there was a monsoon of dry Martinis in both lounge cars before dinner; and celebrity collectors were gratified by the presence of Harold Ross of the New Yorker, en route to California to go fishing with Dave Chasen, of Clay Morgan en route to Sun Valley, and of President Gustav Metzman of the Central itself, en route simply to Chicago where his own business car was waiting to take him back to New York. By his own ruling, not even the president of the Central can have his private varnish attached to the “Century.”
In actual fact, the new “Century” equipment is almost indistinguishable from the old, which will now be relegated to the “Commodore Vanderbilt” and “Southwestern Limited,” the next trains in rank on the railroad. There are a few new tricks of plumbing and lighting and some changes in seating in the dining car which, when put into actual operation, were no improvement at all, but everyone, including Mr. Dreyfuss and the operating department, are happy as kids with firecrackers about the fluorescent lighting, the intercard and train-to-shore telephones, and new compartmentation of the sleeping cars.
The “Century” is so glittering in its appointments and so opulent with chic that it was with something of relief from the bon ton that your correspondent at Chicago climbed aboard the Burlington's “Exposition Flyer” and discovered in its consist an old-time brass-railed observation car of venerable age and well-worn armchairs. We have always been at heart a cinder-snapper, which is the railroader's name for a passenger who likes to ride the open platform cars, sticks his head out of nonair-conditioned windows, and generally gets soot in his hair.
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