On Mar 16, 2021, at 10:54, Steve Ellis via groups.io <meadowbrookdairy@...> wrote:

Were car attendants based in the same cities as dining car crews and did they have similar schedules?

On Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 10:51:58 AM EDT, Steve Ellis via groups.io <meadowbrookdairy@...> wrote:

Thank you very much. I really appreciate the information, Bill.

Steve Ellis

On Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 10:46:52 AM EDT, Bill Schafer <bill4501@...> wrote:

This is in reply to Steve Ellis's follow-up question about dining car crew bases other than Atlanta. I'm starting a new thread.

The November 20, 1970 timetable is the first that shows the Southern Crescent cut back to tri-weekly between Birmingham and New Orleans, so your trip on a daily Southern Crescent to New Orleans would have been one of the last (as opposed to a tri-weekly Southern Crescent). The daily service Atlanta-Bham continued into the Amtrak era, when it went to tri-weekly effective with the June 1, 1975 timetable. In the post-Amtrak period, the dining car didn’t operate beyond Atlanta; in fact, there was no food service Atlanta-Bham until May 1974, when SOU started offering food/beverage service in a “bar food car”, which photographic evidence suggests was one of the Crescent series sleeper-tavern-lounges.  

 

At one time, maybe as late as the 1960s, Southern dining car crews were based in Cincinnati, Chattanooga, and Washington (and maybe some other places, like Asheville) in addition to Atlanta. I don’t know what their work cycles were; that info is probably in the SRHA archives somewhere. I’m not aware that any full crews were based in New Orleans, at least by the 1950s or 1960s. 

 

During the post-Amtrak Southern Crescent era, I know of at least one steward, Steve Cosmos, who lived in Birmingham, but his crew base was Atlanta. He worked on one of the three long crews and had to deadhead or drive Birmingham-Atlanta to go on or off duty. Pre-Amtrak, Steve had been furloughed for years, but with the clustered retirements in the early-1970s, he was called back to work. I’m sure there were others like him who lived away from Atlanta but had to report there for duty.

 

—Bill