Faster Food

Chris de Winter Hebron recalls his early experiences of "dining at speed"

- Chris de Winter Hebron

One of my earliest boyhood memories is of travelling to Lowestoft to see my grandparents in one of Gresley's "tourist stock" coaches. Then, postwar, we started to go on holiday to Devon. Devon itself was magical: but that first journey from London to Ilfracombe was appalling. It was August 1945: no restaurant cars had yet been restored. My mother had made honey sandwiches before we left, but we were crammed five-a-side in Third Class with the seat arms up, so getting them out was a problem, let alone eating them.

In 1946, we managed to get on to the Atlantic Coast Express (Ace). The Ace did have some new corridor stock, and some restaurant cars had also been restored, but rationing was still in force and the fare they could offer was extremely limited. Then, in 1947, my father got wind of a new train - a Pullman called the Devon Belle. Things were never to be the same again.

This time there was no queuing: the Pullman supplement included reserved seats. Followed by a porter with our cases on a hand-barrow, we made our way along the massive line of umber, gold and cream coaches, the impression of length heightened by the first car being the Observation Car; starkly modern, its severe rear slope was unlike anything I'd seen outside science fiction, and the almost blank wall of the bar, following all that glass, seemed to make it longer still.

In our carriage, the dream continued. The seats were palatial you sank into them so, that if I leaned back, my feet hardly touched the floor. There were armrests, too, and the multiplicity of little coatracks. The napery and silverware. The table lamps. And this was Third Class.