The Hotels and Rail Catering

Abstract

The reasons for creating a separate Executive for the railway hotels and catering services were never set out explicitly. There seems to have been little more than the vague feeling expressed by Barnes, himself an hotel-keeper in a small way, that a shakeout in the management would be beneficial. In the Second Reading Debate on the Transport Bill, he had floundered badly. ‘Railway hotels are first-class for the first-class passengers, but there are no railway hotels to cater for the vast majority of persons using the railways. The refreshment rooms of railway hotels [sic] do not serve refreshments — meals and food — [Interruption] — These are very serious matters to the majority of the people who travel on our railways.’¹