One More for the Road? Bar Cars May Face a Last Call

[madinmaryland]

I used to ride on these every night when I worked in NYC.

The cocktails started early, before the train left Manhattan, and by 6 p.m. most of the passengers were already on the second round. Tiny vodka bottles and punched ticket stubs littered the floor. A game of dice by the bar was getting rowdy as a couple canoodled in the corner, beers in hand.

The bar car is a mainstay of the commuting life, a lurching lounge on wheels inseparable from the suburbia of Cheever and “Mad Men.” “The commute is so bad as it is,” explained Paul Hornung, a financial worker, as he sipped a Stella Artois. “This is the one thing you can look forward to.”

But perhaps not for long.

Having survived numerous attempts at prohibition and outlasted its brethren in the suburbs of Chicago and New Jersey, the bar car out of Grand Central Terminal is now facing its gravest threat: the great recession.

A new fleet of cars will soon replace the 1970s-era models now used by commuters on the Metro-North Railroad line heading to Connecticut. But with money tight, railroad officials said they could not yet commit themselves to a fresh set of bar cars, citing higher costs for the cars’ custom design.

“They’re being contemplated,” said Joseph F. Marie, Connecticut’s commissioner of transportation. “But we have not made any final decisions.”

Defenders of the boozy commute say it helps raise revenue: after expenses, bar cars and platform vendors made $1.5 million last year, up from $1.3 million in 2008. (Officials would not say if a bar car makes more money than a car with the normal number of seats.)

:(

[TheCentepedeShoes]

1. There is a movie called

The April Fools with Jack Lemon and Catherine Denueve
And there is a scene (or two) on the train to CT with a bar car and a bartender making drinks at one end and all the hatted corporate guys (this was late 60's) crowding around and clamoring for their drinks
I will ask Mr 'pede about this, he lived in CT a good deal of his life
I went into NYC from Armonk or so and back on the train in the early 80's but there was no bar car

[madinmaryland]

2. It was MetroNorth which is the CT branch of NY Transit. I think it was the New Haven

line that had the bar cars by the 80's. I rode those off and on from the mid 80's to the early 2000's.

I remember hanging out with friends having a couple of "oil cans" on the way home.