What Happened to America’s Commuter Bar Cars?
In the 1960s, a suburban commuter returning from New York City would head over to Penn Station or Grand Central Terminal to catch a train. Much like in 2026, the ride home could take well over an hour. Unlike in 2026, the train would likely have a bar car.
Described by one 1977 Daily News article as “the commuter’s answer to the old neighborhood saloon,” the bar car was a high point in a lot of riders’ days. It was the fun little party they enjoyed on their way home, where they’d get to unwind alongside the other passengers and the familiar bartender on board.
The beers weren’t fancy, but they weren’t trashy, either: “We pour top brands,” says Walter McNamara, director of special services for the Long Island Rail Road. “We can’t try to put over a grade B brand on the trains. People won’t accept it. We tried one kind of cheap vodka once. It took us 14 months to get rid of it.”
The highlight wasn’t usually the booze but the people drinking it. “The camaraderie, the card games, the atmosphere, it’s all part of my daily schedule,” one commuter in the 1980s told reporters about the scene at the New Haven Line’s bar car. “It has created social relations that otherwise would not have existed.”
Some passengers were still prioritizing visiting bar cars as late as the 2010s. The site Where’s the Bar Car would help commuters on the New Haven line track down exactly which of the vanishingly few would be available on any given day.
Although it’s difficult to find videos of the American bar car in its true ’60s and ’70s heyday, the clips you can find from the early 2010s invoke a twinge of jealousy. Even with just a handful of them left on the New Haven line by that point, a strong sense of community comes through in this footage.
The commuters in those cars sure seemed to know what a good thing they had, too. “This would be a boring ride without the bar car,” one LIRR passenger told reporters in 1977. “Those guys who just sit in their seats for an hour and a half… I don’t know how they do it.”
Fast forward to 2026, and sitting in your seat for an hour and a half is often your only option. The average commute home is quiet and sober. Drinking on commuter rail in New York is not explicitly forbidden, but it’s no longer something you can do efficiently. “While we currently do not offer food or beverages aboard trains,” MTA media liaison Laura Cala-Rauch tells VinePair, “our LIRR and MNR customers have plenty of dining options, including Grand Central and Grand Central Madison.” But stopping off to buy a beer can add at least a few minutes to your commute, and any unexpected delay in that task can mean you’ll miss your train.
The train ride home was once suburban commuters’ time to decompress and have fun; now it’s yet another thing to get through before work-life ends and real-life begins.
Credit: WGN-TV
What went wrong?
The decline of the bar car is the story of the decline of American commuter rail itself. Whereas it was once the popular method of travel for the middle and upper class, in the mid-20th century the train became increasingly viewed as a transit mode for the poor. Rich and middle-class people drove, the logic went; if you were poor, you’d take the train until you improved your circumstances, and then, of course, you’d buy a car as the American dream decreed.
This trend was a gradual one and varied throughout the country, but the effect was clear: If trains were seen as handouts for the poor, then trains were expected to justify every penny they asked for from the government. The bar cars were fun, sure, but what good was fun if it came at the taxpayers’ expense?
This new attitude was made clear in a New York State audit report published in 1977, which revealed that the bar cars were not turning a profit on their own and were in fact subsidized by the M.T.A.
Newspapers like The New York Times treated the “unnecessary extravagance” of the state’s commuter bar cars like a scandal, depicting Metro-North’s apparent $52,000 loss in 1975 (a $340,000 loss in 2026 terms) as an unforgivable sin. That sum is a drop in the bucket for a business with a current budget in the billions and deficit in the millions.
The harshness of the news coverage, though understandable given the financial mess New York City was in by the mid-’70s, was a depressing sign of how far passenger rail had fallen. The New York metro area was (and still is) the most rail-centric area of the country, but the growing wisdom was that passenger rail should be turning a profit, not treated as a public service.
“People were pretty boisterous, and, at least in my experience as a New Yorker, exceedingly willing to talk to strangers that evening. I remember it being lots of laughing and loud conversations as we made no stops between Harlem and Stamford.”
“Those Scotches‐cum‐soda imbibed by rail commuters on their way home to Connecticut and Westchester have been paid for, in part, by abstinent fellow riders,” The Times wrote. Reporting also zeroed in on the train bartenders’ tendency to downplay how much they were earning in tips. Service workers underreporting tips for the tax benefits is an issue that applies to countless bars and restaurants, but the M.T.A. bartenders were placed under particular scrutiny. The audit argued that the “M.T.A. should consider prohibiting tipping” as a way to boost the trains’ bar revenue.
While New York’s fiscal crisis improved from its ’70s nadir, the pressure to discontinue the bar cars remained. One by one, each commuter line leaving Manhattan dropped the amenity, and by 2014, it was only the New Haven Line — the wealthiest of the Metro-North routes — that kept its bar cars around. Most were first replaced by portable bar carts that functioned similarly to beverage carts on a plane. Those were soon replaced by bar stands on the platforms, and those, too, were largely killed off by the late 2010s.
Today, the only train bar service you’ll find in the U.S. is on long-distance lines run by Amtrak or Brightline, journeys that aren’t typically created with commuters in mind. While you can have fun with the wine and beer options on these inter-city trains, these are not routes most people are taking regularly or with a consistent cohort.
Trading social connection for cold efficiency
“People were pretty boisterous, and, at least in my experience as a New Yorker, exceedingly willing to talk to strangers that evening,” says Brian Howald, recalling his experience on the last-ever bar car ride on Metro-North in 2014. “I remember it being lots of laughing and loud conversations as we made no stops between Harlem and Stamford.”
Howald was a 26-year-old software engineer at the time, and he found the bar car to be somewhat of an improvement to the experience of drinking on the trains in Berlin where he went to college.
“On the bar car, I got to buy a bunch of strangers a round and talk to them about what brought them there,” says Howald. “Some people had done it for years, and for some it was also their first time. The bar car was definitely better suited to allowing a group of people to have a conversation, whereas getting the seats facing each other on the S-Bahn was a crapshoot.”
“Not everyone wants to be sitting or standing in an aisle among 20 rows of seats for an hour.”
Even for the rides that weren’t a historic occasion, those who frequented the bar car tend to remember them fondly.
“Cheap beers and a friendly vibe,” says Scott, a financial tech worker who occasionally patronized the bar car in the late 2000s and early 2010s. “Man, I wish they brought the bar cars back. The seating was so much better since they had these sort of round cupholders on the poles that fit a bunch of different cups in them. Way better than having to hold your beer the entire time the way it is now.”
Although most young, suburban New Yorkers’ eyes tend to light up when they first hear about the bar cars that used to liven up the dreary trains they now take home from work, not everyone was sad to see them phased out.
City Journal’s Matthew Hennessey described the Metro-North bar car in 2013 as a “stainless steel canister,” complaining about its “cramped quarters” and “drab decor.”
A more mixed take from Slate’s Troy Patterson still mocked the modern cars’ lack of classiness. “Should you be nostalgic for the bar car’s standards of service and presentation?” he wrote. “Depends: does a tender tear come to your eye at the thought of sucking red wine through a swizzle straw poking from the plastic lid atop a clear solo cup?”
These complaints didn’t seem to anticipate the era of loneliness on the horizon, an age where we’ve convenienced our way out of so many of the spontaneous, in-person interactions that were once routine. The true appeal of the bar car was never the quality of the drinks or the sophistication of the decor; it was that this was a place to easily socialize during what would otherwise be an empty slot in one’s schedule.
As the bar car slunk off to its apparently permanent death, a new type of commuter train car rose in popularity: the quiet car. This was a car where people could focus on their work after hours, a place where socializing was outright forbidden.
Some riders bemoaned the death of the quiet car on Metro-North during Covid, but they can take solace in the fact that every car is the quiet car now. Nobody’s talking to anyone outside the group they came in with, and the majority of commuters spend their trip on their phone with their headphones in. And when people are making noise, like playing TikToks or blasting music on speaker, they’re being loud in a markedly anti-social manner.
Credit: The Daily Times
Why booze on trains might still return
In the years after their extinction, there were a few attempts to bring bar cars back. In 2016, the Connecticut Transportation Department announced they’d be returning soon — “It was something that legislators and customers had asked for,” said an aide to then-Governor Dannel Malloy — but those plans were quietly scrapped in 2018.
“It was looking more and more expensive,” one Connecticut DOT spokesman told reporters, “and it was ultimately decided to just suspend the program.”
In the end, the true death knell for the bar car came down to seating. The regular train cars could fit more seats, which meant the train could sell more tickets. As Jim Cameron, founder of Connecticut’s Commuter Action Group, explained, “I think that until we get enough seats for everyone who has a ticket, we should hold off on talking about these amenities.” The New Haven line could improve its capacity by shortening its headways or adding additional cars to its trains, though both options are easier said than done.
Passenger trains in the New York metro area did admittedly have plenty of more pressing issues to deal with in the 2010s, and those problems only worsened when the Covid pandemic devastated ridership numbers. Bar cars will never be a No. 1 priority for commuter rail, which means they will only ever return in times when the industry is already thriving. For most of the past 40 years, it’s been hard to imagine that day would ever come again.
But things have improved in recent years, especially in New York. Congestion pricing has given the M.T.A. a much-needed, additional source of funding. Ridership in 2025 rebounded to 88 percent of pre-pandemic levels. In September, Governor Kathy Hochul announced a new express route from Poughkeepsie to New York City. The MTA may not be thriving, but it is clearly heading in the right direction; does that direction lead to some renewed beverage service on board?
Beyond New York
Another source of hope for a bar car revival comes not from the Tri-State area but Chicago, where the Metra commuter trains have recently experimented with bringing in café cars. In 2025, they placed the new cars on various passenger lines from Sept. 30 to Dec. 11 and asked riders to fill out surveys about their experience. The early results, revealed at a Metra Board Meeting in November, showed that “94% would pay for drinks and snacks” and “nearly 60% of participants said they would visit the café car one to two times a week.”
The riders particularly praised the atmosphere of the car, with one saying their favorite part was the “random, loud bursts of laughter of people connecting.” Another urged Metra to avoid putting any kind of TV in the café car, out of fear of it ruining the vibe.
“We have a working group looking at the next steps for the café car,” says Metra spokesman Brendan Carmody. “They are considering how and when to roll out café cars and have just started meeting. We expect it will be a while before any recommendations can be made.”
The café cars may not have had alcohol on them, but that could (and should) change if they return full-time. These prototypes, with their similar designs to the café cars seen on Amtrak today, seem like they could easily handle some limited beer and mixed-drink options.
“I would like bar cars to return,” says James Hoffman, who owns a company called Right Foot Tours offering cocktail-centered tours of Manhattan. Hoffman did not get to frequent the bar cars while they were still around, but he has fond memories of bringing beer onto the train anyway.
“Man, I wish they brought the bar cars back. The seating was so much better since they had these sort of round cupholders on the poles that fit a bunch of different cups in them. Way better than having to hold your beer the entire time the way it is now.”
“A few years ago I had a family member spend a lot of time at hospitals in New Jersey and Boston,” Hoffman says. “I didn’t really have a lot of free time as I was constantly traveling on NJ Transit and Acela. Being able to relax and enjoy views while having a drink was a pretty nice break from a pretty stressful time in my life.” If passengers are going to drink anyway, shouldn’t the transit operators reap the monetary benefits?
The Metra café cars’ layout also seemed to capture a clear part of the bar cars’ appeal. As Howald puts it about his 2014 bar car experience, “A key element was how the car was arranged: a bar, a seating area that allowed six to eight people to be face-to-face and plenty of room to stand and move around.”
“Not everyone wants to be sitting or standing in an aisle among 20 rows of seats for an hour,” he adds. “I’m skeptical of the alcohol part, but a car configuration that allows people to be more social seems like a fun idea, even if I can’t vouch for its cost effectiveness.”
Even if the Metra cars decline to serve alcohol, permanently adding them to the line would still be a step in the right direction. It could provide commuters yet another incentive to take the train, save time for those already traveling by rail, and bring back a bit of that social atmosphere the bar cars emitted.
Sure, the bar car might not return unless train travel in the U.S. enters a renaissance, but the improvements at Metra and Metro-North signal that such an era might not be as far off as it seems.
The article What Happened to America’s Commuter Bar Cars? appeared first on VinePair.