The galley is the kitchen in the dining car. It has to be worked like
those puzzles that won’t come out right unless you move the pieces in
just the proper order back and forth into one tiny little space. When
you see all the food being loaded into the diner for one trip, you can’t
believe there’s any space left over for cooking.
But everything has been planned ahead of time so that it all fits inside
the car. The cooks and the waiters have all gone to school where they
learned how to prepare and serve food for dozens of people without
getting the small galley cluttered up and out of order. Many diners have
mechanical dishwashers.
People eat so much on diners that railroads buy bananas by the boatload,
meat and butter and coffee by the carload. One road has its own potato
farm and turkey ranch.
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A table for two people in a diner is called a deuce. One for four people
is a large. When a waiter has customers sitting at all his tables, he
says that he is flattened out. And if he makes a mistake or gets
nervous, the others say he has gone up a tree.
It is fun to eat on a train, but the railroads themselves are very
serious about food. They have experts who plan special menus to please
boys and girls. They figure out new ways of serving food so that it
looks and tastes like Thanksgiving all year round. One road even asked
scientists to grow fancy roses for the dining tables and to invent a
chemical that could be mixed with water to keep the roses fresh!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]