Well There‘s Your Problem - Bonus Episode 50 PREVIEW: The Dining Car

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

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 puta https://www.flickr.com/photos/129679309@N05/26538253983/

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. The What now? The What? The news butcher. This is a sleep paralysis demon. What the fuck are you talking about? This looks like Alice in Wonderland.

I don't... I like his fruit basket. This is cornucopia hats, say, train bowl. Yeah. We should sell one of those. We should sell a hat that says Train Boy. I took this out of the Porterfield book. We could kill it.

I mean, it's barely, I'll do some typography. It sells irrespective of gender, yes. What? We are 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. 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 yeah he's got like a 360 degree double um yeah this guy looks like it's he's the neal part of selling stuff 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. Well, and nobody in the political cartoon except for him looks like they're having a good time. No, he doesn't even look like he's having a good time. He looks haunted.

That the woman in the back with the big old bug eyes, like that's a great little portrait, uh, little illustration. That's how I feel of the trade. Yeah. The thing people don't tell you about olden times is people look scary as fuck. Well, he's, this is a man who knew how to dress, Nova. Yeah, that's true. The news butcher, sometimes shortened to just the news butch.

Yeah. Okay. Sure. Oh, yeah. That's when they invented them. News butcher, a news butch implies news twink, I know. A news fam, surely. News fam, excuse me.

I got to understand the binary and or spectrum. Yep. Yes, we've been doing this. The news butcher has various wares to sell you. He has newspapers, sweets, fruits, cigars, and bad 1825 sandwiches. Oh yeah, the sawdust special, baby. Oh, okay, sure. Yeah.

All this can be had for what was usually a pretty unreasonable price, and it usually wasn't very good, and it usually was smelly as well. So if someone else, like, I don't know, bought a bunch of hard-boiled eggs for them or something, you know, everyone in the car is subject to this. A bunch of offensively smelling hard-boiled eggs from a train butch. I mean, just imagine what the, like, the fruit on the bottom of the basket is like. I mean, all, I mean, refrigeration is not even the question. It's like, how quickly does it go bad? How did those bananas get there?

Oh, God. Yeah. Is there 1825 bananas? In like, fucking, the brownest that it has ever been. Smells are going to be a common theme throughout the 19th century.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. This is a bad solution. The news butcher is like intrusive. and annoying, right? They never really go away. I hate you, butcher. But 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. Eating house. The food house, if you are. Yeah. This is cool. Yeah. What if we took the architecture of like the Alhandra, and we took it and we put it in the

middle of the desert and you could get like a slightly fresher meal there? 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? The solution here was to formalize the procurement of food at stations by way of the eating house. And so these are enormous restaurants which are capable of serving the entire train at once in 20 minutes. Whoa. Oh, that's so good. You're gonna need a lot of butchers.

Yeah. So the conductor comes into your car and he rings an enormous gong. The dinner bell. 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. 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. 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. Cool. And the basic problem here is that eating a whole meal in 20 minutes sucks.

Yeah, they got to scarf everything down. It's like being in the Marines, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Everybody's coming back on with hiccups. 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. Most of the rest of the eating houses were crappy. A lot of times they weren't owned by the railroad. 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 you have to like fight your way to one of the different ones yeah and then if you got to walk three minutes you you only have 14 minutes to eat everything 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 is like well ours is 65 cents third guy is like 50 cents and a good bottle of wine next guy is like uh 45 cents and a bottle of wine and a pretty young lady will wait on you You. Yeah. Good thing I have more than 13 minutes to do this. Yeah, exactly. And then, of course, there were the scams.

So 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 steambox, because there's no heat lamps yet. And they repeat the cycle for the next guy. Oh, my God. It's amazing. 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. How do you have time for rampant prostitution? I don't know. I don't know how... 20 minutes and you're running into like your food time as well. Yeah.

Getting, getting the, like, the hand job from St. Maud, the most dispiriting possible Like a blow dart, let's do that. It's amazing. I mean, it'd have to be a real industrial operation, too. That's a whole trainload of people looking for... 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. This is why you put the hand job on the train idea.

Yeah, this is why we got quibby instead of any of this shit. 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, everyone ate so fast, they all started farting and purping, everyone was miserable, everything smells bad. This is not the concern of the railroad. Eating houses were pretty cheap to run. They had fantastic economies of scale, and they didn't add too badly to passenger train schedules, Right? Because 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. You know, 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. Yeah. It's libertarian, sort of. Yes. It's a strong market. The higher, the hair, the closer to God.

That's right. Yeah. So we move into sort of the early antebellum period. I wrote down late. It's early anthravellum. The standard passenger car is what we would call a crackerbox car, right? Okay, sure. I don't know if we can say that on Elon Musk's X.com.

Is that edible? I hadn't even thought of it in that way. So these cars have like low roofs, low flat.