What was your best meal aboard an Amtrak train?

Perhaps food not considered bad for coach passengers....but terrible considering the upcharge/s first class pay for "bed and board"

I once had dinner in a diner. But nothin could be finer than to have your ham and eggs in carolina.

Dinner: July, 1990, Zephyr/Pioneer/Wind, westbound. I gave the grilled stuffed trout w/rice and veggies. It was amazing! And when it came, the other three people at my table took one look, and were wishing they'd gotten it too. I was going sleeper on that trip, so on the second night out, I had the New York strip steak. I'd eaten the baked chicken the night before on the Broadway.

Actually, I always found the food excellent. I did a lot of overnight Amtrak trips between 1989 and 2002, and I always rotated through my four favorite dinner entrees. Breakfast would find me eating either the pancakes or the railroad French toast. Lunch, I always got the beefburger (except on the Desert Wind on that 1990 trip when I got a regional special that was similar to macaroni with beef in a tomato sauce)...

2002 marks the last time I was on any of the long-distance trains when I did a weekend trip (Philly-St. Louis) on a circle routing so that I could experience a mix of the equipment Amtrak operates. Thanks to my choice of trains on the return trip, I pretty much had to live on microwave cheeseburgers and breakfast sandwiches for the entire trip...

I need to make another trip just to sample the current fare. All my trips since 2002 have been either on Regionals or my four trips per year on the Maple Loaf to Toronto...

And I have to say....after a 2005 ride on VIA Rail's Ocean with a set of Budd equipment...I found myself depressed to be stepping back onto Amfleet and realizing how much things have changed here....

Dinner on the Empire Builder westbound on the detour route during the flooding, crusing by the Mississipi river with water on both sides. The food was really quite good too. Everything was prepared exactly as it should have been; it was definitely "upper-middle-class restaurant" quality, better than diners. The portions were small compared to current standards but my fiancee was on a diet, so that was fine.

That was in June. A lot better than the LSL food, although there was nothing wrong with the LSL food (diner-quality, I'd say) except for the failure to provide dinner in the evening at Albany, and failure to notify people to go eat in the train station (which combination is really not acceptable on the schedule they have).