Bonus Episode 50 PREVIEW: The Dining Car

full episode on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/138556268 have some sources: Porterfield, James D. 1998. Dining by Rail : The History and the Recipes of America’s Golden Age of Railroad Cuisine. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. White, John H. 1985. The American Railroad Passenger Car. JHU Press. thumbnail image from roger putahttps://www.flickr.com/photos/129679309@N05/26538253983/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Justin Roczniak?

  The design of railroad cars changed to something more familiar where the car has like aisles and like benches in there, which leads to the proliferation of a guy named the news butcher.

• 0:14Liam McAnderson?

  What now?

• 0:15November Kelly?

  The what?

• 0:16Justin Roczniak?

  The news butcher.

• 0:18November Kelly?

  This is a sleep paralysis demon. What the fuck are you talking about?

• 0:22Liam McAnderson?

  This looks like Alice in Wonderland. I don't, I like his fruit basket.

• 0:26November Kelly?

  This is cornucopia hats, a train boy?

• 0:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 0:31November Kelly?

  We should sell one of those. We should sell a hat that says train boy.

• 0:34Justin Roczniak?

  I took this out of the border field book.

• 0:37Liam McAnderson?

  We'll make a killing.

• 0:38November Kelly?

  I mean, it's barely, I'll do some typography, like it sells irrespective of gender. Yes.

• 0:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. We are saying, seeing on the screen, for those of you who are listening audio only is a man. There's a man here walking down the aisle of a train car. He has a sort of cornucopia basket of fruit on his head. And then he's wearing an outfit composed of hoops, presumably from a barrel, but without the staves. On those hoops are various, uh, they're filled in with the shelf. And on those shelves are wares.

• 1:20November Kelly?

  Yeah. He's got like a 360 degree double.

• 1:24Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. This, this guy looks like it's, it's, he's the Neil Peart of selling stuff.

• 1:28November Kelly?

  And he's, he is selling, he's selling a periodical to a guy who appears to be a Turkish statesman in that he is wearing morning dress and a fez. Yes.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  And nobody in the political cartoon, except for him, looks like they're having a good time.

• 1:40November Kelly?

  No, he doesn't even look like he's having a good time. He looks haunted.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  That the woman in the back with the big old bug eyes, like that's a great little portrait, uh, little illustration.

• 1:50Liam McAnderson?

  That's how I feel on the train.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53November Kelly?

  The thing people don't tell you about olden times is people looked scary as fuck.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Well, he's, this is a man who knew how to dress Nova.

• 2:03November Kelly?

  Yeah. That's true.

• 2:05Justin Roczniak?

  The news butcher, sometimes shortened to just the news butch.

• 2:12November Kelly?

  Okay, sure.

• 2:14Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:15November Kelly?

  That's when they invented them.

• 2:17Justin Roczniak?

  News butcher, a news butch implies news twink, I know.

• 2:21November Kelly?

  A news fam, surely.

• 2:22Justin Roczniak?

  News fam, excuse me.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  You gotta understand the binary and or spectrum.

• 2:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 2:28November Kelly?

  Years we've been doing this.

• 2:32Justin Roczniak?

  The news butcher has various wares to sell you. He has newspapers, sweets, fruits, cigars, and bad 1825 sandwiches.

• 2:43Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah, the sawdust special, baby.

• 2:44November Kelly?

  Oh, okay, sure.

• 2:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, all this can be had for what was usually a pretty unreasonable price. And it usually wasn't very good.

• 2:53November Kelly?

  He was the first train, Robert.

• 2:55Justin Roczniak?

  Smelly as well. So if someone else, like, I don't know, bought a bunch of hard boiled eggs from him or something, you know.

• 3:06Justin Roczniak?

  Everyone in the car is subject to this.

• 3:09November Kelly?

  Offensively smelling hard boiled eggs from the train butch.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  I mean, just imagine what the like, the fruit on the bottom of the basket is like. I mean, all, I mean, the refrigeration is not even the question. It's like.

• 3:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's completely out of the question.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  How quickly does it go bad?

• 3:26Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm. How did those bananas get there?

• 3:30November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 3:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Justin Roczniak?

  Is there 1825 bananas in like fucking, fucking third damn boy New Jersey?

• 3:47Justin Roczniak?

  Smells are gonna be a common theme throughout the 19th century.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:51November Kelly?

  Hmm, yeah, sure.

• 3:53Justin Roczniak?

  This is a bad solution. The news butcher is like intrusive and annoying, right? They never really go away.

• 4:00November Kelly?

  News butcher.

• 4:02Justin Roczniak?

  But uh, the railroads sort of try and say, okay, we're running longer distance trains. We need a better solution here. Their solution was the eating house.

• 4:14November Kelly?

  Hmm. Eating house. The food house.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  This looks smart. Yeah.

• 4:18November Kelly?

  This is cool. Yeah. What if we took the architecture of like the Alhambra? And we took it and we put it in the middle of the desert and you could get like a slightly fresher meal there.

• 4:28Justin Roczniak?

  Well, this is one of the really nice eating houses. Most of them were not like this. This is a Fred Harvey house. I forget where. It's one of the famous ones. It's what shows up if you put Harvey House into Wikipedia. Anyway. We'll talk about Fred Harvey in a second. So if this is a very long trip, ultimately you actually need a substantial meal. Ideally, one that's edible and you may need several of them, right?

• 4:58Justin Roczniak?

  The solution here was to formalize the procurement of food at stations by way of the eating house.

• 5:05Justin Roczniak?

  And so these are enormous restaurants which are capable of serving the entire train at once in 20 minutes.

• 5:13November Kelly?

  Whoa.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Oh, that's so good.

• 5:15November Kelly?

  You're gonna need a lot of butchers.

• 5:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So the conductor comes into your car and he rings an enormous gong.

• 5:25November Kelly?

  Uh huh. The dinner bell.

• 5:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And he says 20 minutes for lunch. You had 20 minutes to get off the train, go into the eating house, eat the meal, come back to the train and get back on board and the train left.

• 5:41November Kelly?

  Huh. I mean, so, so all of these places, they only have to hold up to like 20 minutes of everybody piling in there at once.

• 5:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the telegraph helped a lot here because you could put in your order with the conductor beforehand. So you actually got what you wanted. If it was a railroad owned eating house, which it frequently was not.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 6:03Justin Roczniak?

  And the.

• 6:05Justin Roczniak?

  The basic problem here is that eating a whole meal in 20 minutes sucks.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, they gotta scarf everything down.

• 6:11November Kelly?

  It's like being in the Marines. Yeah.

• 6:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Back on with hiccups.

• 6:15Justin Roczniak?

  Everyone gets indigestion. Constantly. Everyone's farting afterwards. Everyone's burping. You know, even when the food was good, this sucked. A lot of times the food wasn't good. There's these luxurious dining facilities at, you know, premier railroad intermediate stations like Altoona for the Pennsylvania or Poughkeepsie for the New York Central. The luxury train stopped there. Uh, most of the rest of the eating houses were crappy. A lot of times they weren't owned by the railroad. Uh, so several eating houses at, you know, major stations would compete for customers, right? They have guys out on the platform trying to flag you down.

• 6:56November Kelly?

  Yeah, you have to like fight your way to one of the different ones.

• 6:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  And then if you gotta walk three minutes, you, you only have 14 minutes to eat everything.

• 7:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes. So they have guys on the platform like come to my eating house. We have a decent meal for 75 cents. Next guy's like, well, ours is 65 cents. Third guy is like 50 cents and a good bottle of wine. Next guy is like, uh, uh, 45 cents and a bottle of wine and a pretty young lady will wait on you.

• 7:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Liam McAnderson?

  A good thing I have more than 13 minutes to do this.

• 7:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. And then of course there were the scams.

• 7:36Justin Roczniak?

  So you go to, you go to get the 50 cent meal, right? It's brought out to you so hot that you can't eat it and you panic. And you get back on the train without eating. And then they put the meal back in the steam box because there's no heat lamps yet. And they repeat the cycle for the next guy.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Oh my God. It's amazing.

• 8:00Justin Roczniak?

  This is not to mention, you know, a lot of these privately run eating houses, get that poor hygiene, constant lack of silverware, constant lack of China, rampant prostitution as well. That was a big factor.

• 8:14Liam McAnderson?

  How do you have time for rampant prostitution?

• 8:16Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know. I don't know how.

• 8:18November Kelly?

  20 minutes and you're running into like your food time as well.

• 8:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 8:26November Kelly?

  Getting, getting the, the like the handjob from St. Maude's, the most disparaging possible.

• 8:32Liam McAnderson?

  Like a blow dart. Let's do it.

• 8:34Justin Roczniak?

  It's amazing. It had to be a real industrial operation too. That's a whole trainload of people looking for handjob.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  This is just evidence of the 19th century's industrial dominance. I mean, it's just that you can't, you can't imagine an experience like this in the 21st century.

• 8:49November Kelly?

  This is, this is why you put the, the handjob on the train idea.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. This is why we got quippy instead of any of this shit.

• 8:56Justin Roczniak?

  And as we mentioned before, even if you got a decent meal at a railroad run establishment or a respectable place like the Harvey House, uh, everyone ate so fast, they all started farting and burping. Everyone was miserable. Everything smells bad. Uh, this is not the concern of the railroad. Eating houses were pretty cheap to run. Uh, they had fantastic economies of scale and they didn't add too badly to passenger train schedules, right? Cause back then, you know, the steam locomotive has to be fed and watered as well, right? It's got to take on coal and water every hundred miles or so, which is when the eating houses were located.

• 9:36Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and, and those few eating houses that served good food, the railroad owned them. That was embellishing for their reputation and the private eating houses where all the horrible stuff happened. That is somebody else's problem.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:48November Kelly?

  It's, it's libertarian sort of.

• 9:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 9:52November Kelly?

  It's a strong market. The higher the hair, the closer to God. That's right.

• 9:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So we move into sort of the, the

• 10:02Justin Roczniak?

  early antebellum period. I wrote down late. It's early antebellum. Uh, the standard passenger car is what we would call a cracker box car, right?

• 10:14November Kelly?

  Okay. Sure. I don't know if we can, we can say that on Elon Musk's X.com. Is that edible?

• 10:21Justin Roczniak?

  I hadn't even thought of it in that way. Um,

• 10:25Justin Roczniak?

  so the, these cars have like low roofs, uh, low flat.