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The Dining Car & The Diner

The first railroad passengers boarded an American train in 1830. They’d better not have been hungry. Dinner wasn’t served until 1868, when George Pullman designed a sumptuous dining car for the Chicago & Alton. Pullman’s “Delmonico” and the dining cars that copied it on hundreds of lines all over the country offered meals cooked to order and table settings equivalent to those in a hotel restaurant. Gentle chimes called passengers to dine, and for a hundred years after the first tones sounded, the best dining cars were on a par with any restaurant in the country. Railroad chefs had a special advantage, gathering local ingredients in farm towns iu fishing ports as they went along. Delicious food was essential to drawing customers, and the railroads willingly subsidized the feast, typically losing 50 cents on every dollar spent in their dining cars.

With the passage from the Pullman to the dining car, there was an impressive continuation of the condition of things. Here again was a technical structure to do work—the rapid preparation and distribution of food in a confined space. And here again there was a tone for the whole operation established by nice arrangement and regulated service procedures. In the fresh linen, the substantial chinaware, and the solid cutlery of simple design, there was a no-nonsense elegance appropriate to time and place. And, following the opening act of prestidigitation by which the new tablecloth replaced the old one without appearing to disturb the sugar bowl, the salt and pepper shakers, the menu holder, and the carnation in the vase, there was the ordering of food and the serving of it with neatness and dispatch. And then there was the food itself—no attempt to borrow distinction (never really achieved anyway) from haute cuisine or Szechwan, but the authentic, homegrown stuff: ham and eggs, beef, lamb chops, Idaho bakers, chocolate ice cream, baked apple. What counted was quality—U. S. Prime cross the board—and the preparation: roasting, frying, and grilling done to the required turn.

Depot restaurants were spotted along the right of way at appropriate intervals, and three times a day the cars were hand-braked to a smoking halt; their occupants then engaged in a pitched battle with the management to get fed in the conventional twenty minutes allowed at each stop. No favorable commentary on the depot fare of the Southwest has survived, although contemporary reports indicate that things weren’t nearly so bad on the Union Pacific a few hundred miles to the north. Without exception the depot-lunch proprietors of Kansas, Missouri, and Colorado were descendants of the Borgia family. To their talents as poisoners, some of them added those of brigands. They would bribe the train crew to sound the “all aboard” whistle before the prescribed twenty minutes had elapsed. The passengers had paid in advance; nevertheless, what they left on their plates was sold again to the next trainload of arrivals. The food was simply terrible.

It occurred to Fred Harvey that perhaps a railroad restaurant which offered reasonably edible fare and honest treatment of the customers might attract favorable attention and even make money for its altruistic proprietor. Its very novelty would occasion comment. The Burlington management had other things on its mind when he brought the idea to its attention. But the management of the Santa Fe—in the person of Charles F. Morse, a general superintendent with a taste for unsalted butter and underdone steak—saw eyetooth to eyetooth with Harvey, and in 1876 the first Harvey restaurant came into being in the railroad’s Topeka depot and office building.

The impact was sensational. Word that “an eating house with a conscience” was in operation, serving tastefully prepared food in clean and well-ordered surroundings, spread far and wide, nowhere more swiftly than among the drummers or commercial travellers who formed a ponderable part of the railroad patronage in those days and who began planning their itineraries so as to be in Topeka at mealtimes.

In the opening years of the last decade of the nineteenth century, it was becoming apparent that the universal meal-stop along main-line railroads was becoming a thing of the past. Faster schedules and limited trains caused operating departments to take a dim view of three half-hour stops a day in addition to the operational and switching stops dictated by absolute necessity. The introduction of dining cars on the faster and more luxurious trains was the solution of the problem. In the beginning, because of the limited tractive force of locomotives, diners were more frequently cut into trains at division points and carried only long enough for the service of a single meal, or perhaps breakfast and lunch, before being switched to a siding and then cut into a following train, or one bound in the opposite direction, for dinner. It was an intricate and vexatious process, but even the pauses required to pick up and set out diners once or twice a day didn’t add up to the delay involved in three full meal-stops.

In 1892, the Santa Fe placed in service the first of the great trains that were to make its operations the transportational glory of the West. The California Limited, a name radiant in the lexicon of the Old Southwest and one that ornamented the Santa Fe timecards until well after the Second World War, carried a luxurious innovation in the form of a through diner that rode with the Pullmans all the way from Chicago to Los Angeles. Thus a new pattern of de luxe travel made its appearance, and from that day until comparatively recently much of the best food served in the United States was served on flanged wheels.

For Fred Harvey to take over the operation of the Santa Fe’s dining cars was little more than an extension of an already well-established and elaborately routined service operation. The same organization that purchased Texas steers on the hoof at Kansas City, supplied California citrus to Chicago terminal restaurants, and distributed game, seafood, and dairy products at strategic points over half a continent, lent itself with a minimum of strain to the operation of mobile eating establishments that rolled night and day over the same huge territory.

To the dining cars Harvey brought the same decorum and the elevated amenities of food and service that had been the hallmark of his wayside operation. Irish table linen from Belfast and Sheffield silver as heavy as that in the best private clubs were the rule. There was a variety and quality of food in keeping with the opulent Harvey tradition of frontier generosity. The diners of the California Limited set the standard; those of the Colorado Express, the Missionary, the San Francisco Limited, the Grand Canyon, the Navajo, and eventually the Chief and Super Chief, followed in its footsteps. The best of everything was none too good for the Santa Fe’s patrons, and until his death Fred Harvey saw that that rule was enforced on thirty-odd Santa Fe dining cars.

Although other western carriers like the Great Northern might advertise the luxury of eating aboard their crack name-trains, it was the Santa Fe which travellers always used as the standard of culinary excellence. “Real railroading begins west of Chicago” has long been an American aphorism, and by “real railroading” most passengers mean the quantity and quality of the food available to them. Other railroads have had dining-car stewards of national celebrity, such as Wild Bill Kurthy aboard the Union Pacific-Southern Pacific’s Forty-Niner and Dan Healey on the Milwaukee’s Pioneer Limited. But the Harvey organization has eschewed spectacular personalities in favor of an urbane worldliness and savoir-faire that would have pleased the legendary and monocled Olivier of the Paris Ritz.

The original intention of Fred Harvey was to provide a Harvey facility approximately every 100 miles along the Santa Fe main line between the Great Lakes and California, but the trend in recent years has been away from on-line services and in the direction of operations entirely disassociated from the Santa Fe, such as inns, hotels, and restaurants, away from the railroad’s tracks and terminals. And the company has recently undertaken the merchandising of a number of proprietary-brand food products, including the special blend of coffee that has been sold at Harvey Houses everywhere since the firm was founded.

Amtrak still offers dining-car service on some of its routes, but an era is nonetheless over. You can no longer hear the chimes and order a “Great Big” baked potato on a Great Northern train. You can’t look forward to a steaming casserole of chicken pie on the Santa Fe Chief or linger over one of the Twentieth Century Limited’s renowned custard desserts. For those who consider the dining car of the past the happiest convergence of human beings and train travel, only remnants are left.

Diners used to be everywhere. Since the turn of the century the long, low, oddly cheery buildings have been the restaurants of the working class. But now that’s all changed, and the traditional diner, once an inescapable fixture of the American landscape, is hovering on the verge of extinction.

The diner first appeared, in the form of a lunch wagon, on the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, in 1872. In that era, every restaurant in town closed at 8 P.M. It occurred to Walter Scott, a man whose entire previous experience as a restaurateur had been confined to selling pies from a basket, to load a covered express wagon with food and park it outside the offices of the Providence Journal. And there he stayed, every night from dusk until two in the morning, for the next forty-five years, selling sandwiches and boiled eggs to the compositors for a nickel, and sliced chicken to the “dude trade” for thirty cents.

Scott’s idea spread rapidly. A decade later, his imitators throughout the East were running elaborate wagons with kitchens and counters, whose stained-glass windows were etched with portraits of the Presidents. For a while, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union operated a fleet of these, attempting to lure men from the saloons with cheap, hot dinners.

Diners began to come off their wheels in 1897, when the street-railway companies of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston started to switch from horse-drawn to electric cars. The abandoned cars were sold for as little as ten dollars each to entrepreneurs who moved them to vacant lots, installed counters, and opened for business. Within live years, more than five hundred trolley-lunches appeared. They tended to be rough, seamy places, and they gave the fledgling industry a bad name—respectable people did not frequent diners.

This was changed by Patrick J. “Pop” Tierney, a New Rochelle manufacturer who is still remembered in the business as the man who helped legitimize the diner by “bringing the toilet inside.” In 1905 Tierney started selling miniature restaurants, thirty feet long, ten and a half feet wide (the maximum width permitted for railway shipment), with barrel roofs. By 1917—when Scott retired, grumbling that new and overweening customers were demanding a slice of onion with their egg sand wiches—Pop Tierney was turning ou t a diner a day.

During the twenties, diners appeared in every crossroads town, serving the motorist as the depot restaurant had served the rail traveler of the last century. By the end of the decade, they were firmly established as good, inexpensive places to eat, a reputation that carried on into the thirties, when manufacturers were touting the running of a diner as a “depression-proof business” that could bring a successful operator upwards of $12,000 a vear.

The look of the diner changed during the late twenties and thirties. Transoms borrowed from railroad-car design replaced Tierney’s barrel roof, and stainless steel took the place of wood. When the railroads introduced streamlining, the diners followed suit. This sort of ingenuous imitation gave rise to the persistent legend that diners were reconditioned railroad cars.

The diner went through its final transformation in the years following World War n. At first, it simply grew larger; but eventually the old form was abandoned in favor of Moorish and Mediterranean buildings, made of concrete and surrounded by huge parking lots. This expensive refurbishing meant an increase in the price of the meal. The resulting vacuum was rilled by the fast-food franchise chains, which gave those who were comforted by such things the illusion of having the same cheap food in the same room whether thev were eating in Fresno or Bangor. Today the franchisers have swept the field; the diner is being upgraded out of existence. Of course, the diner is one of our humbler traditions. But when the last one gives way to a Mediterranean fantasy with gold-veined mirrors and two-dollar cheeseburgers, something singularly American will have vanished.

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