Take a Ride on the California Railroad Freighted With Beauty and History

Katrina Schwartz: And actually, some of it follows a route that’s close to the first transcontinental railroad.

Train announcement: The original main track up and over Donner Pblock, part of the first transcontinental railroad that was frequently closed by snow and ice during the winter months…”

Katrina Schwartz: There’s something very nostalgic…and cool about a train journey. And in terms of California history…the railroad and its connection to food….was hugely important. I know I’m not the only one who loves trains….and what could be better than a summer trip on the rails…for your ears?

Today on the show, we’re riding the California Zephyr to learn about some of the most iconic spots on this route, the history of fine dining on trains and how Black railroad workers were a crucial part of the civil rights movement. I’m Katrina Schwartz and you’re listening to Bay Curious. Stay with us.

Trains have become a far less common mode of transportation than they used to be. But there’s one Amtrak line, the California Zephyr, that train enthusiasts LOVE because the route is so beautiful and historic. Reporter Lisa Morehouse hopped on the train in Emeryville to discover the connections between food and the railroad for our friends at the California Report Magazine. I’ll let Lisa take it from here.

Train sounds. A horn blares

Lisa Morehouse: I love riding the California Zephyr. I plan on looking out the window the whole time I’m on it.

Lisa Morehouse in scene: We’ve pblocked Richmond…We’re right on the edge of the bay…I mean, if this window opened and I jumped out, I could be in the water. This is one of the great things about traveling on the train. you get to see parts of your world you wouldn’t just see traveling in a car.

Lisa Morehouse: And yeah, I’m whispering because it’s a little early in the morning, and some of my fellow pblockengers are dozing. At the base of the Carquinez Bridge, we turn away from the Bay and head into the Delta, and can see its islands and snaking waterways.

Conductor announcement: A couple other items to note, folks… 

Lisa Morehouse: Some people are riding the California Zephyr today just to get from point A to point B. But I meet folks who are giddy about being on the train.

Toddler singing: I’ve been working on the railroad”

Lisa Morehouse: like this toddler marching down the aisle

Toddler singing: I’ve been working… 

Conductor announcement: Alright everyone, at this time, the dining car is open for lunch.

Lisa Morehouse: And my lunch companions, Jamie Thomas and Shreya Jalan.

Train steward: I’m going to sit you right next to this young lady here.

Lisa Morehouse: We’ve been seated together in the dining car, where white table cloths and flower vases offset the plastic plates. They both tell me, riding the Zephyr has been on their bucket lists.

JamieThomas: I always took trains with my dad. My fondest memories are sitting with him and, like, chatting or getting dinner together. It was a very good place to connect with people.

Lisa Morehouse: Even strangers. The dining car practices “community seating.”

Shreya Jalan: And the number of stories we get to hear and exchange, I think it’s really beautiful.

Lisa Morehouse: On shorter routes today, a lot of trains have cafe cars, with drinks, snacks, pre-packaged food. But many of the longer Amtrak routes have dining cars like this one, with a full kitchen taking up the whole lower level of this train car. All three of us order the chili.

Lisa Morehouse in scene:  The chili’s good.

Train steward: Here’s the chef! (Sounds of clapping)

Lisa Morehouse: Okay, a little history.

California’s portion of the transcontinental railroad was called the Central Pacific. By the time it was completed in 1869, trains with dining cars were already running out of Chicago.

It would take California a while to catch up. But the four men who owned the Central Pacific — they were known as the Big Four  — had big plans after the transcontinental went through. They bought another railroad line, a tiny one called the Southern Pacific, and expanded it dramatically from the Bay Area, down to Los Angeles over hundreds of miles all the way out to Louisiana.

In the early days of the Southern Pacific, the Big Four had a near-monopoly in California. Riding the train was prohibitively expensive. But when a competing company — the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe — later reached Los Angeles, it caused a rate war. tickets from Chicago to LA dropped from $125 to $1. Los Angeles went from cow town to boom town.

But in those early days on the train, there were few amenities, and people packed their own food to avoid terrible roadhouse meals.

Lawrence Dale: Most of the people would make fried chicken and stuff and get on the train.

Lisa Morehouse: That’s Lawrence Dale. I met up with him in Barstow, at the Western American Railroad Museum, a few months before my California Zephyr ride.

Lawrence Dale: And they trade some of that fried chicken for pillows and stuff but that’s what they did. They brought their own food.

Lisa Morehouse: Lawrence… has a long connection to the railroad:

Lawrence Dale: I’m retired. Santa Fe BNSF railroad employee. Spent 42.5 years on this railroad.

Lisa Morehouse: I’ve been learning that the further the trains went, the less practical it was for pblockengers to bring all their own food on a trip. And when there’s a vacuum, someone will try to fill it. Enter businessman, Fred Harvey.

The museum takes up a section of what was once Barstow’s Harvey House, right off the railroad tracks: a restaurant designed for train pblockengers. It’s beautiful, with  columns, decorative brick arches, shaded walkways…

Lisa Morehouse in scene: It’s a very elegant building. if you were to pull up on a pblockenger train, this would look very inviting.

Lawrence Dale: Oh, yeah. It’s it’s a nice building and very attractive.

Lisa Morehouse: Starting in 1878, Fred Harvey built Harvey Houses in partnership with the Santa Fe railroad, every 100 miles. They served fancy cheeses, oysters, fruit, sirloin, and generous slices of pie. Another big attraction: waitresses known as Harvey Girls.

Lawrence Dale: All I can tell you about Harvey girls is they were young women out of the Midwest.

Movie Clip: Miss Bliss? You’ve got yourself another Harvey Girl

Lisa Morehouse: The 1946 musical The Harvey Girls starred Judy Garland.

Harvey Girl musical clip: In this day and age girls don’t leave home, but if you get a hankering and want to roam, our advice to you is run away on the ATSF. Mr. Harvey. Fred Harvey knows exactly how to pick ‘em…we come from Dubuque….

Lisa Morehouse: This film gave a romanticized view of their lives, and whitewashed this period in the West. Harvey Girls were young, single, and almost always white.

Lawrence Dale: And they were brought in here by Fred Harvey and they weren’t allowed to date. They weren’t allowed to do nothing except serve the people.

Lisa Morehouse: Of course, plenty of Harvey Girls did marry, and relocate to farms and ranches across the West.

Harvey Girl musical clip: All aboard for Californ-i-a.

Lisa Morehouse: But while they were Harvey Girls, they worked long hours, and lived in dorms, under the watchful eyes of house mothers.

Harvey Girl musical clip: Perfection in the dining room, perfection in the dorm, we even want perfection in the Harvey uniform.

Lawrence Dale: White gloves, white full cover apron with a black garment underneath. Bow in the back of the hair.

Harvey Girl musical clip: The apron must be spotless and must have the proper swirl. That’s the first requirement of the Harvey Girl.

Lisa Morehouse: This was an elevated dining experience…but it was efficient, not leisurely. Trains called in pblockengers’ orders ahead.

Lawrence Dale: They communicated by wire, the telegraph system.

Lisa Morehouse: Say a West-bound train pulled into Needles, California. The conductor would come through the cars, taking orders, and contact the next Harvey House down the line — like Barstow — letting staff know how many people planned to eat, and what time they’d arrive.

Harvey Girl musical clip: Just received a service wire from train #7. Dining room for 44, counter for 11.

Lisa Morehouse: Pblockengers disembarked, sat in the well-appointed dining room, and had a limited time to eat, before the train left the station. 

Harvey Girl musical clip: (gong sounds) Dining room to the left…ample notice will be given before the departure of the train.

Lisa Morehouse: Harvey Houses were kind of a precursor to fast food, and chain restaurants. And they helped change the intent of train travel from something that was just utilitarian, to an experience.

Sound of being on the train

Train conductor announcement: Thank you for taking Amtrak’s California Zephyr. Come back and ride again with us. Sacramento coming up.

Lisa Morehouse: Sacramento’s loaded with railroad history. The Central Pacific started here, of course. Years earlier, during the Gold Rush, trains transported picks and shovels and other goods from the city into the foothills to the miners. And it’s home to the California State Railroad Museum.

Sounds of kids and train whistle

Lisa Morehouse: I visit on a field trip day, and the lobby is a chaotic scrum of 4th graders, some in conductor’s hats, some blowing train whistles.

Ty Smith: There’s some right over here.

Lisa Morehouse: Museum director Ty Smith points out one of the first displays you see when you walk in. It holds artifacts of a Chinese workers camp.

Ty Smith: In fact, ginger jars and tea.

Lisa Morehouse: There’s a big glazed stoneware jar to store vinegars and sauces for flavoring rice.

Ty Smith: You’ll see the very familiar form of the rice bowl

Lisa Morehouse: Smith says, even though Chinese workers made up 90% of the labor force for the Central Pacific Railroad, they were in segregated camps.

Ty Smith: The Chinese railroad workers didn’t get the same pay or. Food allowances that their Irish, and other counterparts did.

Lisa Morehouse: I knew Chinese laborers built the railroads under really harsh conditions, but seeing these remnants from a segregated camp, I’m just hit in the gut with the racism baked into the building of the railroads, the difference between people who owned the railroads and the people who worked on them and those white pblockengers who were wealthy enough to ride them in the early days. I learn more about that at the next exhibit Smith takes me to.

Lisa Morehouse in scene: Okay, where to next?

Ty Smith: The dining car!

Lisa Morehouse: But first we walk through the museum’s sleeper car.

Ty Smith: And we actually have it on a rocker

Lisa Morehouse: To simulate the feeling of being on a train. We climb a few stairs into the sleeping car, through a couple tight pblockageways…

Lisa Morehouse in scene: Oh, we are rocking!

Sounds of kids walking through sleeper car

Ty Smith: During the day, the upper berths would be folded up. The lower berths serve as comfy seats.

Lisa Morehouse: At night, porters would unfold the upper berths and convert the seats to create beds. And if pblockengers wanted anything, they’d press a little button, to call a porter.

Ty Smith: The other iconic thing we have is the dining car.

Lisa Morehouse: This 1937 car was called the Cochiti. It ran on Santa Fe’s Super Chief train between Chicago and Los Angeles.

Ty Smith: We are in the working kitchen of the Cochiti Dining Car.

Lisa Morehouse: It’s so narrow, I can’t quite imagine all the people needed to work here, to prepare three gourmet meals a day for 50 people.

Ty Smith: The chef, people doing prep, mise en place, you’d have to find a cadence to work within the space. A lot of gleaming stainless -steel like surfaces – knives and graters and colanders and big soup pots.

Lisa Morehouse: All perfectly organized for a tiny space.

Sound of chime for dining room

Lisa Morehouse: Called to the dining room by chimes, pblockengers would sit among abundant flower arrangements and intricate art deco metalwork, eat at tables with tablecloths, and china, with patterns inspired by the route: poppies in California, animal images inspired by native american art in the Southwest.

Allen Blum: Here’s a menu for the super chief. Ripe California colossal olives. Grapefruit, orange and raisin fruit.

Lisa Morehouse: Allen Blum is a docent on the dining car

Allen Blum: Swordfish steak. Poached salmon. Old fashioned boneless chicken pie. Small steak, $1.25.

Lisa Morehouse: This California-influenced menu was typical – they reflected cuisines and ingredients along the route.

Lisa Morehouse in scene: Who would who would typically be riding the train in 1937 and eating in the dining car?

Allen Blum: Walt Disney would, Jack Benny, he’s a comedian, I’ve been told that Marilyn Monroe was on this train. Which would be a little later, period. Named stars and politicians.This was considered definitely first clblock.

Ty Smith explains that the businessman best known for railroad dining cars was George Pullman. He built and owned luxury train cars to appeal to pblockengers who wanted to travel in style, and he leased his cars to the railroads.

Lisa Morehouse: Pblockengers on Pullman dining cars came to expect attentive service – one waiter per two tables.

Ty Smith: Pullman is creating the romance of the train travel. To ride on a Pullman car means something, And, this this feeds, his ability to to lease these cars to the railroads.

Lisa Morehouse: But George Pullman built this image and his business on the backs of the Black service workers he hired.

Susan Anderson: It was a luxurious experience, but it was a completely racialized experience.

Lisa Morehouse: Susan Anderson is history curator at the California African American Museum.

Susan Anderson: From the appointment of the sleeping area to the dining car to the cuisine and the meals, the way that you were waited on, all of that was just premium. And all of it on the Pullman cars were provided by Black labor.

Lisa Morehouse: White men held positions like engineer and conductor.

Susan Anderson: The servant type jobs were the ones that were reserved for Black people on the trains: Porter. Steward. Cook. Maid. Waiter. George Pullman and the Pullman Company were block about this. They wanted white people to be waited on by Black people, because in our history, racism conflated being a slave or being a servant with being Black.

Lisa Morehouse: Porters — who did everything from turning down beds, carrying luggage, and serving food — were often not addressed by their own names. They were called George, after George Pullman.

Susan Anderson says, the subjugation of Black workers on trains was a direct reflection of the way the U.S. economy was organized.

Susan Anderson: So that’s U.S. history. But Black history is that they took these positions and they made the most out of them, and they used them to the advantage of their own people and their own families.

Lisa Morehouse: Many African Americans saw railroad jobs as opportunities to broaden their horizons, bring money back home, or leave Southern states altogether and move their families elsewhere.

Susan Anderson: People who worked for the railroad got a lot of respect in the community.

Sounds of singing

Lisa Morehouse: That was depicted in the 1933 film The Emperor Jones, based on the play by Eugene O’Neill.

Singing: Way out yonder in the middle of the field, angel working at the chariot wheel.

Lisa Morehouse: In his breakout film role, actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson, plays the title character, who leaves his small Southern town to be a Pullman Porter:

Singing: Oh let me fly (repeat) I got a mother in the promised land. There’s your train, son. Goodbye folks.

Lisa Morehouse: Museum curator Susan Anderson’s own family has railroad history.

Susan Anderson: One of my great grandfathers, my mother’s father’s father was a chef on the railroad.

Lisa Morehouse: A man named Edward Wilcox, whose family was originally from Louisiana.

Susan Anderson: And they came to West Oakland in the late 19th century. They actually established a church in West Oakland. It’s still there, Bethlehem Lutheran Church. And that enclave was partly like a labor reserve for the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Lisa Morehouse: By 1926, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of African American workers in the country — with over 10k porters and 200 maids.

Anderson says, a lot of intellectuals ended up working as porters, or waiters.

Susan Anderson: There were college men who had no other employment opportunities in a racist economy.

Lisa Morehouse: These railroad men left a big legacy in American civic and cultural life: In his autobiography, Malcolm X wrote about selling sandwiches on trains. Renowned photographer Gordon Parks waited tables in dining cars. Thurgood Marshall, Willie Brown, Tom Bradley, and Dionne Warwick, they all had fathers who were porters.

Railroad workers networked with each other, across the country, sharing copies of Black-owned newspapers and other literature.

Susan Anderson: And they began the effort to organize so that they could demand better wages, better working conditions for themselves, better hours.

CL Dellums: There was no limit on the number of hours the company unilaterally set up the operation of the runs.

Lisa Morehouse: Cottrell Laurence Dellums, known as C.L., was an Oakland-based activist. You may recognize his last name — late congressman Ron Dellums was his nephew.  CL Dellums started working for the Pullman company in 1924. In an oral history interview, he said the salary at the time was $60 a month.

CL Dellums: They provided what we said just enough rest between trips for the porter to be able to make one more trip.

Lisa Morehouse: Hours could vary widely — from 300 to over 400 hours a month.

CL Dellums: Anybody could take the porters job and not only any kind of Pullman official from from the lowest to the highest could take his job. Anybody traveling as a pblockenger, even though it might be the first trip they’ve ever been on a train, they could write him up and get him fired.

Lisa Morehouse:  Kept out of the American Railway Union, African Americans founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters & Maids in 1925, and Dellums began signing up workers for the union, despite the risks.

CL Dellums: I never heard of a war, that there weren’t battles and never, never heard of a battle without casualties….But I will I will be heard from. And so I did. And sure enough, of course, they did discharge me.

Lisa Morehouse: He eventually became one of the union’s Vice Presidents.

It took years, but the Brotherhood became the first Black union to be recognized by the American Federation of Labor.  And, in 1937, they got a contract with Pullman, the first in history between a Black union and a large U.S. Company. They established an 8-hour work day, regulated work schedules, and increased pay.

But the Brotherhood influenced much more than service work on railroads. They helped push through the desegregation of the defense industry during WW2. And were on the ground for many efforts during the Civil Rights Movement: Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington.

We tend to pay a lot of attention to these big moments, but they only were possible after the decades of networking and organizing by the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Sounds of riding the train

Lisa Morehouse: I’ve learned how the people behind the simple act of railroad dining changed California, and the country. Looking out the window of the California Zephyr, on the outskirts of Sacramento, I see irrigation ditches, crops in perfect rows, pear and walnut orchards. And I think about how the railroads impacted agriculture.

Benjamin Jenkins: The first entire railroad car full of oranges left Los Angeles for the Midwest in 1877.

Lisa Morehouse: Archivist Benjamin Jenkins is the author of The Octopus’s Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California. Those oranges traveled by a refrigerator car, packed with ice.

Benjamin Jenkins: It had to be re-iced like ten times across, going across the desert in the Badlands to make sure that the fruit didn’t spoil.

Lisa Morehouse: He says, it took California’s produce industry about a decade after that to take off:

Benjamin Jenkins: But once it starts, it really never looks back. So the explosion of new people, new crops as a result of the railroad bringing them in and then shipping the goods out is just utterly transformative for California.

Santa Fe Railroad promotional film: The best fed nation on earth. That’s what they say. The people of the USA…whether you   live in…

Lisa Morehouse: Here’s a promotional film made by the Santa Fe Railroad in the mid-50s.

Santa Fe Railroad promotional film: The chances are the next orange you eat or the next glblock of juice you drink will be from California.

Lisa Morehouse: Railroads built spur lines off the main lines to access huge parts of the state.

Benjamin Jenkins: Wherever the railroad goes, land values start to increase. And so they are able to sell land at a premium.

Lisa Morehouse: In many states the government had given the railroads loans, and gifts of enormous tracts of land. The idea was that, after the tracks were built, the railroads could sell off much of that land at a profit, to farmers, who’d build packing houses right on the railroad tracks. Jenkins says, there were fewer of these kinds of land grants in California, but the railroad companies still got rights of way, sometimes over native people’s reservations, and became huge landowners:

Santa Fe Railroad promotional film: The development of the railroad has gone hand in hand with the development of the fruit and vegetable industry.

Lisa Morehouse: Communities tried to entice railroads to come their way. Entire “citrus cities” began forming in the late 1800s along the railroads, especially in Southern California.

And railroads shipped out more than just produce.

Benjamin Jenkins: Full color advertising starts to appear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Lisa Morehouse: Selling a packaged California lifestyle. The Southern Pacific Railroad launched Sunset Magazine, to draw people out west. Those labels on wooden packing crates that get shipped out?

Benjamin Jenkins: All of these images show, perpetually sunny Golden State, the fruits of Paradise being grown underneath these purple snow capped mountains… really, every segment of California society, from city chambers of commerce to big businesses to farms all participate in this idea of let’s advertise California as a new Eden.

Sounds of the train

Lisa Morehouse: Back on the California Zephyr, we’ve started climbing into snowy, spectacular scenery.

Train announcement: In approximately 15 min we will be above Donner Lake which will be visible.

Lisa Morehouse: In the observation car, every seat is taken. One pblockenger has her sketchbook out. Others are taking videos and photos.

I am, too. Even though I was born and raised in California, I’m still in awe of its breathtaking beauty, and there’s no place like a train to witness it.

I also know that the history of California’s railroads is one of exploitation of workers and land.

I’m trying to hold both of these truths.

Lee, the steward: Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is Lee, your dining car steward. If you’re interested in having dinner in the dining car.

Lisa Morehouse: The sun is setting, and we’re pblocking through a beautiful, remote landscape when the call for dinner service comes. When I enter the dining car, the steward points out the window, to shapes moving in the distance

Lee, the steward:  See them up on the hill. Right to the whole herd of Look, look, look, look, look through.

Lisa Morehouse: Wild horses.

Lisa Morehouse in scene: My God. There are dark ones. And then they’re kind of almost caramel colored ones.

Lee, the steward: You see them in National geographic…and you be like, wow!

Sounds of diners

Lisa Morehouse: Dining on the railroad is different now than during the height of luxury rail travel. But I don’t know where else I’d have an experience like this… I’m eating steak and chocolate cake, among a group of strangers who are all looking out the window, seeing wild horses running across the hills at sunset.

Katrina Schwartz: That was reporter Lisa Morehouse. Thanks this week to the California Report Magazine for this story. Their show takes you around the state, showcasing what makes California unique. You can hear more on their podcast. Find it wherever you listen. This story was edited by Victoria Mauleon and produced by Suzie Racho and Brendan Willard with help from Sasha Khokha.

Bay Curious is produced in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.

Our show is produced by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. With extra support from Alana Walker, Maha Sanad, Katie Springer, Jen Chien and everyone on team KQED.

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.

Maybe there’s a train journey in your future! Have a great week.