Food-express: the unusual exhibition on train gastronomy at Ground Control - our photos

Ground Control is offering us a little unusual this summer, an exhibition at the heart of bar cars and meals on trains. From July 10 to October 5, 2025, visit the free Food-express exhibition.

When we think of trains and the railway world, we rarely think of food, and even less of quality gastronomy. Few passengers enjoy eating in the bar car during their train journey... Yet there was a time when eating on trains was a serious business. Ground Control's free exhibition takes us on an unusual journey to discover these forgotten culinary habits.

From July 10 to October 5, 2025, Ground Control presents Food-express - Photographies d'une cuisine en mouvement, an exhibition that follows on from"Wagon-bar. Une petite histoire du repas ferroviaire", presented at Rencontres d'Arles in 2024. This Paris exhibition brings together a number of industrial photographs, advertisements and posters, and archival images dating from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Over the course of the decades, we can see how advertising images have changed usage.

Conceived with the SNCF group, the Orient Express Endowment Fund and the Newrest Wagons-Lits group, this unusual exhibition should appeal to a variety of audiences: train fans and gastronomy enthusiasts will find themselves immersed in universes they love, whilehistory buffs will be able to observe a variety of settings, which speak volumes about the society of each decade. Indeed, there's a world of difference between the wine-and-cutlery meals of 1959 and the individual sandwiches and cakes of 2024.

The Food-express exhibition highlights the major changes in railway catering, from station buffets to dining cars, carts and snack bars. Depending on the era and the company, these changes sometimes symbolized social and technical advances.

The Ground Control exhibition also features a series of reports and advertisements from different eras, promoting trains and railway companies in France. The exhibition is short and the theme may surprise some, but Ground Control is sure to entertain us with this original and intriguing exhibition, to be seen free of charge this summer!

This test was conducted as part of a professional invitation. If your experience differs from ours, please let us know.