Atlanta and Birmingham which, in point of equipment, may be compared
with the best limited trains anywhere. The last car in this train,
instead of being part sleeping car and part observation car, is a
combination dining and observation car--a very pleasant arrangement, for
men are allowed to smoke in the observation end after dinner. This is,
to my mind, an improvement over the practice of most railroads, which
obliges men who wish to smoke to leave the ladies with whom they may be
traveling. All Seaboard dining cars offer, aside from regular à la carte
service, a sixty-cent dinner known as the "Blue Plate Special." This
dinner has many advantages over the usual dining-car repast. In the
first place, though it does not comprise bread and butter, coffee or
tea, or dessert, it provides an ample supply of meat and vegetables at a
moderate price. In the second place, though served at a fixed price, it
bears no resemblance to the old-style dining car table d'hôte, but, upon
the contrary, looks and tastes like food. The food, furthermore, instead
of representing a great variety of viands served in microscopic helpings
on innumerable platters and "side dishes," comes on one great plate,
with recesses for vegetables. The "Blue Plate Special" furnishes, in
short, the chief items in a "good home meal."

This is, perhaps, as convenient a place as any in which to speak of
certain points concerning various railroads in the South. The Central of
Georgia Railway, running between Atlanta and Savannah, instead of
operating Pullmans, has its own sleeping cars. This is the only railroad
I know of in the country on which the tenant of a lower berth, below an
unoccupied upper, may have the upper closed without paying for it. One
likes the Central of Georgia for this humane dispensation. The
locomotives of the Western & Atlantic carry as a distinguishing mark a
red band at the top of the smokestack. The Southern Railway assigns
engineers to individual engines, instead of "pooling power," as is the