This may be no surprise to those of you who run dining cars, but this was today’s Atlas Obscura feature story:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dining-car-food

AO and ClickAmericana are both interesting resources for period-correct recipes and presentation.

"A terminus in the Pacific Northwest" --- Seattle?

I’d guess that’s most likely.

Funny side note about those giant baked potatoes: trucker friend had a dining car group ask him where to get such a thing and how much they might cost. He was hauling taters to a potato chip company at the time and told them the very small and really huge ones were dumped at the loadout because they didn’t process with the chip company’s equipment. Several hundred pounds of free giant spuds later, dinner came off without a hitch. After that, Second Harvest was glad to have their crew come out and glean the fields, which saved the farm the trouble of cleaning out the giants (they caught on to marketing the little ones.)