The Pull of the Pullman

As the 17:48 train pulled out of Paddington station on a recent Friday evening, my family and I were as far removed from a typical commuter train journey as could be. We’d taken this particular train because it is a very rare beast indeed in still including a Pullman dining car.

They operate only on weekdays for three lunch services and three dinners per day in and out of Paddington for operator GWR. With table clothes and waiter/waitress service it is the only smart restaurant-on-wheels you will find today beyond the likes of the Orient Express, The Royal Scotsman, the forthcoming Britannic Explorer, and other similar high-end luxury trains.

I know from personal experience that these famous trains are superb experiences and they have prices to match. For mere mortals they are certainly in the category reserved for celebrating extremely special occasions. They are not your regular timetabled service out of Paddington. My wife and I took the Orient Express to Venice as part of our honeymoon and it certainly set the standard for train travel and onboard dining. 

We’d also experienced some less high-end, but equally memorable, dining occasions when using European sleeper services including journeys to Vienna, Nice, Moscow, Barcelona as well as the service up to Scotland. My wife is no great fan of flying but I – and then also our children – have been more than happy to veto planes and instead travel by sleeper trains across Europe and enjoy a dinner in the dining car.

Such was the demand for these services 20 years ago that they typically employed two sittings. Since the later was invariably too late for us, and the service more erratic than the first sitting, my task was to seek out the attendant with a clipboard and put our names down for the earlier dinner sitting. While my wife took the luggage to check into the sleeper car, I’d dive straight into the bar and grab a couple of seats for a pre-dinner drink before the bar car became mobbed 20 minutes later.

Sadly over the years the sleeper services declined but I’m pleased to see they are currently enjoying something of a renaissance as a result of a combination of environmental priorities and also the fact it is simply such great fun. It’s so superior to the increasingly inconvenient and painful experience of flying. 

But what these returning trains have been lacking has been the dining experience of old. The restaurant-on-wheels experience that was commonplace across Europe has been replaced with more non-bookable café type set-ups with boring fast food. The cuisines used to reflect the country of the operator but this has become more homogenised over time with predictable food.

The fact the GWR Pullman dining cars fully reflect our earlier experiences makes them so exciting. And the fact they are on regular train services makes them even more of an enticing proposition. They remind me of the times when I would catch the train from Doncaster to London with my mother and we would always have the full English breakfast in the dining car. It was a not inconsiderable £7 per head (in the 1970s/1980s) but it was full-on silver service and we could generally keep things going for the bulk of the one hour 45 minute journey and into the smoke and avoid being sent to our seats in Standard.

The seasonal menu we experienced on our 17:48 service out of Paddington involved prices, with inflation, akin to those breakfasts all those years ago I reckon – with two courses for £37 and three courses for £44. The Panko breaded salmon with a half bottle of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc followed by a selection of British cheese accompanied by a glass of Reserve port and a coffee was a delightful way to spend an hour and 15 minutes made all the more appealing by the lovely service. 

It was a great shock to have to join the real world again as we disembarked at Bristol station while the dining car and the rest of the train trundled on to Swansea. It’s not often nowadays that you wish your train journey could be longer.

We largely had the dining car to ourselves on our trip, which undoubtedly partly reflects the fact the Pullman dining services seem to be an unknown phenomenon to most people. Shockingly GWR seems to do little to publicise this great dining experience beyond the announcement on the train that the dining car is now open – music to my ears. It’s clearly not something you would do every week but if I was a regular on those services then I’d have to partake every now and again – as a friend of mine does when journeying to and from Swansea.

All the talk nowadays is about the demand for richer experiences when people dine out. What can be richer than having scenery constantly change around you as you eat? More people need to know about it and hopefully this could lead to a move towards more proper on-train dining and the Pullman dining car-type services develop something of a following. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to move beyond the trolley and at-table service with QR codes that predominate today. Back to the future please. 

Glynn Davis, editor of Retail Insider 

This piece was originally published on Propel Info where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. Retail Insider would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.