On the top flight Indian trains, meals have always been included in the fare. There is no dining car, the food is brought to your seat, rather like aircraft catering, but the food is rather more fun on the trains.
Not always, but progressively so starting with the Howrah Rajdhani in 1969. Even now this is mostly on the Rajdhanis Shatabdis and trains of that ilk, by far a minority of trains.
Before 1969, prestige trains carried Restaurant Cars that were expensive, and mostly only the well to do (Frist Class and ACC crowd) used them. There was not enough capacity for everyone to use them anyway, so the arrangement worked fine. The rest either bought along food from home or brought food at stations. This business of buying food at stations became somewhat infeasible when the Rajdhani was introduced initially with just two stops of 3 mins each on a 16 hour journey. A third service stop at Mughal Sarai for handing the train from/to Northern Railway to//from Eastern Railway was 5 mins, but it was at Oh dark thirty and was not a commercial stop. Anyway, that was the genesis of food included in fare and served to everyone at their seat/room on the train, since not much else was really feasible short of requiring everyone to bring along their own food for the entire journey, which was deemed infeasible.
On lesser trains, there is often the option to buy food, once again served hot at your seat.
This has always been the standard modus operandi on Indian Mail/Express trains before the advent of Rajdhani/Shatabdi class trains.
Traditionally though Indians tended to bring their own food for journeys that lasted less than a day, which then were a vast majority of journeys, and still is. We always did so in my childhood days on trains like the Bombay mail and Kalka Mail. The AC Express had a AC Restaurant Car which we liked to use. The Kalka Mail did have a Restaurant Car which we never used.
Also the lack of connecting gangways in trains was another deterrent. Typically the Restaurant was adjacent to the upper class segment of the train, even though often not connected by gangways. So you had to wait for a stop to get to it. But then trains stopped quite often back then, so that was not a problem.
The AC Express introduced between new Delhi and Howrah in 1956 was the first train that was fully gangway connected.
Recently, I have noticed that there is a move to allow the inclusive meals to be rejected, and receive a lower fare charge.
Indians have such varied tastes and cuisines that it is almost impossible to meet the smallest expectations of everyone. This is merely a recognition of that fact. This becomes easier to handle with the introduction of food ordering using Smartphones
Although the social side of the dining car is a big plus for Amtrak sleeper passengers, maybe reduced fares and just eliminating the diner option for "included" meals would work, PROVIDED they improved the food offerings available to purchase from the cafe car?
I have been on record stating this about twenty years back when the whole including food in the fare was started, and I was roundly hated for stating so back then. I did not like the across the board fare increase for food, half of which was useless for me.
The biggest problem that India faced in trying to serve food through Restaurant Cars is that it is well neigh impossible to serve 1500 people through Restaurant Cars - requires too many non-rev cars in a train whic already could do with more rev space to meet demand. So they chose to just get rid of as a means for serving food in general. Instead they have one prestige train that carries a Restaurant Car (Deccan Queen) more as a social thing than a food thing, and most Rajdhanis have a Cafe Counter in the Pantry Car.
Incidentally, the new express passenger cars are bringing back the concept of a food storage closet with both hot and cold storage facility in each passenger car, where food can be staged for delivery at the seat. This was designed into the original Rajdhani Cars, but somehow got lost on the way, causing some significant hygiene maintenance problems.
Trying to provide a hot, scrumptious meal in a box seems a bit of a stretch, given the lack of hot, scrumptious meals anywhere aboard Amtrak even with the diners!
Some approximation of a reasonable hot meal in a box may be feasible. In India, because the cuisine involves a lot of fluids (gravy, Daal etc.) they are now tending towards using sealed "Thalis" (like in military canteens) except they are now using recyclable ones made of sugarcane waste and such other otherwise unused fibers. They are apparently liked by the customers too instead of the haphazard collection of plastic and foil wrapped fare with small aluminum cups for fluids etc.
) and fresh fruit.
