Nostalgia & History > Dining on the Adirondack

Hard to believe…..but its 44 years ago this summer since the Adirondack was inaugurated on August 6. 1974. It was an Amtrak train but the Delaware & Hudson Railway provided the equipment including leased CP Rail ‘Skyline’ Dome Coffee-Shops cars. After the Skylines went back to CP......the D&H’s own ‘Adirondack Lodge’ and ‘Saratoga Inn’ provided dining and lounge service. Here’s a Menu from those early days.....and that $1.45 Breakfast would be about $8.00 today and the Minute Steak Dinner......about $21.00.

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Adding the CP Skyline at Albany-Rensselaer (the Dome didn't operate south of there) and again at Whitehall NY. (the Skylines eventually went to VIA and still in service today on the Canadian)
‘Adirondack Lodge’ at Montreal’s Windsor Station in October ‘75.

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Here’s the first Adirondack Timetable issued for the train’s inaugural in August 1974.....but looking at the map it appears to be the route to Montreal Central Station.....(just labeled Windsor Station). This is the route the Adirondack follows today but didn’t start using until 1986.

On the map.....Cantic is labeled Lacolle and Saint Lambert is labeled Montreal West. So I wonder in the planning for the train’s restoration in 1974, if they had originally intended to send it to Central instead of Windsor.....and this would have made sense: The Montrealer had just been inaugurated two years earlier and it used Central..... so why have two separate stations for two trains a day in a foreign country.

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Maybe I’m reading too much into this but it’s fun to speculate on what the original route planners might have had in mind!

Another timetable was issued with a slight correction to the map: the Montreal West stop was at least moved across the river and this timetable was bilingual: English and French. Also note on the map, the train used “gare” Grand Central and the D&H line through Mechanicville and Watervliet-Colonie instead of NYP and Schenectady as it does today.

And here’s my rough photo-shopped version of the route to Windsor Station.

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The D&H even created a new china pattern for this train - the last non-Amtrak china ordered by a railroad for regular passenegr service (several railroads did order china later for office car and other special uses).

Tim

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Thanks for sharing, an interesting theory about the map... certainly is odd showing Montreal West on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River!

Michael

I like the china pattern.  Classy!

D&H bought several ex-D&RGW passenger cars after The Prospector was discontinued in 1967. Among them were the diner-lounge cars that were operated on the Adirondack.

Here is a view of lunch service on the leased CP dome car from the Summer of 1974.

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I'll add a few move pictures from that first summer:

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Great thread!  Thanks for posting the photos and scanning the menu and timetable brochures.

In the first brochure, the map shows Grand Central Station, but the schedule correctly shows Grand Central Terminal.  In the second brochure, the Grand Central Terminal is used in the schedule and the map.

Note the lickety split border formalities and locomotive change time allowances.

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