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Posted on 09/02/2026 1:15:22 PM PDT by Fester Chugabrew
Watch the trains. Stay for dinner.
That is the whole idea, and it is not open yet. I organized an Indiana company—Dave’s Depot & Diner LLC—so the name would be clean. There is no land under contract, no steel in the air, and no one should read this as a grand opening. What follows is the purpose and the goal, stated so a stranger can decide whether the thing is serious.
I have spent a long time beside railroad tracks with something to eat. The train fills the world and then the quiet comes back.
In South Bend there is a stretch of main line, elevated, where Norfolk Southern and Canadian National share the plant. It is a good place to watch power if you are not standing where you should not stand.
Downtown, south of West South Street, between Lafayette Boulevard and South Main Street, there is a parking lot against those tracks. Across the tracks is the old Studebaker Administration Building, which would make a fine railroad themed hotel.
That lot is the ground I have in mind. The purpose is simple. Give people a reserved place to eat and to watch living freight without stepping on the railroad.
Not a museum. Not a bar with a gimmick. Not a festival that lasts a weekend and leaves the ballast to the next trespasser. A depot restaurant: 1920s brick language over the existing lot so the parking remains, four dining rooms named for railroads you can actually see from this town, a dining-car wing patterned on a New York Central Pullman diner and lettered for local association, and along the glass an indoor gallery so a person can sit through weather and still see the plant.
Dinner is by reservation only. A ticket, a sitting, a dress code that belongs in a place of good manners and quiet discioline.
You may come only to watch, cheaper, if there is a chair. You may not treat the vestibule as a sidewalk. Railroads run on mass and on discipline. The building has to take the first (isolation from coupler-slam) and copy the second (a door that does not negotiate).
That is not hostility to the public. It is how a small house stays a house when the window looks at a live main.
Downstairs would be a small jazz lounge bringing in regional and national jazz musicians, a hobby counter, a room for a club or a talk, and a children’s corner with wooden trains.
Around the walls, an HO railroad in glass—local scenes, including a five-track view that copies what the guest can see outside. Operators would run trains on a published schedule with a roster of prototypical, historic content themed daily.
The goal is to open that house with private money. The company is not organized to hunt a tax abatement or a TIF as a condition of existing. Ordinary permits—site plan, building, fire, health, a liquor clock—are what any restaurant needs. A hotel across the tracks, if it ever happens, would be another vehicle.
A rebuild of New York Central Pullman diner #684 dining car certified to move on Amtrak would be another vehicle still. The restaurant, meanwhile, is a restaurant . I have spoken with people who know the 1938 Century diners and with people who work on downtown’s overpasses and passenger-rail talk. I have not been handed a key.
Civic conversation is welcome. Civic subsidy is not the plan. If the City’s only use for the idea is a ribbon, this idea is in the wrong office.
There is a temptation, on any public board, to hang a project on the politics of the week. This one will not carry that load. A freight train does not ask who you voted for.
The point of a depot beside a busy railroad main line is that citizens can sit in the same room and watch something that does not belong to a faction. If that sounds small, it is small on purpose. Most of what ruins a restaurant is a mission that will not fit on a plate.
What we will not do is as important as what we will. We will not sell lifetime passes to fund a drawing. We will not take sealed recipes for our pending signature dish in a contest until the company dates the contest. We will not ask volunteers to raise steel. We will not pretend a display car is rolling stock. We will not open the door to loitering because someone called it charity. (A share of profit after investors are treated fairly can go to charity.)
If you live in St. Joseph County and this sounds like a place you would book, the next right step is patience. The next wrong step is a check “to help Dave get the word out” that later wants a piece of an LLC.
I am not asking Free Republic to build a restaurant. I am saying what the company would be for, while the thing is still a concept, so that when a drawing appears it is not mistaken for a rumor.
Watch the trains. Stay for dinner.
That is the purpose. A disciplined house beside a living railroad is the goal. Everything else is furniture.
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Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
for over 30 years the Old Detroit train terminal sat decaying. they just got done revamping it, and with the new Gordie Howe bridge in, and if they reroute Amtrack and re-establish the railroad hub, it should be a gold mine.
If that place in South Bend is indeed a busy Hub, that place will make bank off it!! People like trains!!
I had to look it up.
The practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience.I'm thinking using lead weighted leather saps reminiscent of 1920s times.
Cheeseburger and fries are fine choices but I’d hope you expand the menu a bit - perhaps do a search for ‘classic passenger train menus’ for inspiration.
I would be disinclined to choose a food at a restaurant that I could replicate at home with low effort.
I also avoid ordering foods which are difficult to do well in a commercial kitchen. For example fried walleye is fine but I never order salmon - i get it up to near room temp before cooking so the oils don’t congeal into white solids on top. I suspect many restaurants would pull the filet from the fridge and cook it right away out of necessity and wipe the congealed oil off with a kitchen rag.
The Boston Leather Model 5413 is one of our line of Denver Sap Impact Weapons. This sap features a looped handle to help you keep a grip on your sap no matter the conditions. This model measures in at 9" long and weighs 10 1/2 oz. Despite being small enough to fit in your pocket, this sap can dish out a surprising wallop with a flick of the wrist thanks to the spring steel in the handle. This Boston Leather sap is constructed with two layers of durable, heavy gauge leather that encase a molded lead weight. All Boston Leather saps are made in the USA.
Family and I ate at a similar place that had just opened in Cheyenne WY. We ate on the patio alongside the tracks.
It’s a neat concept, but in practice, there were these negative aspects:
* Noise!- could not hold a conversation as the engines pulled in.
* The engineers and crew stopped alongside the restaurant (so they could enjoy the cuisine too), so it wasn’t a pass-through.
* Exhaust fumes - not pleasant while eating.
* Overlap - one leaves, another arrives - minimal break.
An interesting option for lunch, but don’t know that I would go out of my way to repeat the experience.
I have no animosity towards trains and the awesome power you feel when they are near, but compared to watching the landing and take-off of jets, well ....
Don’t let your fascination of trains overtake reality for everyone else. Be sure to observe how (and how many) people interact around the tracks - particularly when the trains come in - and stay.
This input is crucial. Train watchers need options. They can be outside or inside by choice, but good heavens, don’t choose outside with an expectation of careful speech that will be properly heard.
I so appreciate dining that can be social and elegant in a fine setting where people look like they want to be there.
I am one of those who abhor the degradation in eating attire, where now, you can go nearly anywhere with flip-flops and a t-shirt.
I miss being able to take my wife out to someplace nice, and having to meet a standard of appearance. You look out of place if you appear wearing a suit or her a cocktail dress. v I actually miss that. Shaving. Putting on a small spot of cologne, something I do now maybe once every two or three years. Looking over to see my wife next to me, looking in the mirror, her neck extended with earrings dangling down as she sprayed her characteristically sensational perfume on her neck.
It is a ritual from my parents that I got to experience, I know. I can remember my parents who went out all the time when we were kids, him being career Navy stationed overseas during the Vietnam War) so that today just smelling even the slightest fragrance of her perfume (Shalimar) would flood my mind with the sight, sound, and smell of the ritual.
They spent a lot of time at the Officer's Club, and...when they went, they rarely if ever went casual. But it was those times when you could tell it was some fancy thing like a going away party, a promotion, or their own anniversary.
My dad would come out, replete in cuff links, dressing in his civilian suit with the same degree of meticulousness that he displayed in his military dress. Everything spotless. Holy Cross Class Ring on. Starched shirt. Tie tight, straight, and correctly pinned. Plumb line seamless from the knot of the tie through the buttons of the shirt down the center of the belt buckle to its terminus at the bottom of the zipper.
His angular face was shaven clean as the military teaches, and his flat-top crewcut, perfectly tapered down the sides and back of his head and his hair would be sticking straight up and raked slightly forward at the front, just above his blue eyes, held in that angle by some kind of special wax.
And I have some of that wax. Every single time I pop it open just to smell it (because I no longer possess either crewcut or hair!) it makes me think of my dad. Every morning he used it, but on those special occasions it defined him by that smell. God. I so hero-worshiped my dad. He had flaws, but those weren't important to me. Been gone 26 years now and I still wish I could hear his masculine, baritone no-nonsense voice again.
And my mom. She was a beautiful woman with a flair for elegance. Italian and Armenian, she got the best attributes of both, from both a character and appearance in general. Dark hair. Dark eyes. A face that had one dominant characteristic: It did not have an ounce of subtlety or dissemblance to it. Looking at her face was like looking into a window for me. There was never once in my whole life I can recall, where looking at her face didn't reliably inform me of what was going on in her mind. I saw it all, or at least it seemed so to me as a kid. As an adult, there was no question about it.
And when my parents were going out, my dad shone with ship-shape order, but my mother-she glittered and sparkled!
She always looked perfectly made up. Not all women have this skill. But my mother did. Everything on her was in harmony, tasteful, and subtle, with one exception: her lipstick. And she carried that exception well. She would use the absolute minimum of makeup on her face, but enough to accentuate her slightly olive skin. She did accentuate her dark Italian eyes, but she did it without the distracting effect. And she did use the fake eyelashes too, which as a kid, fascinated me.
Her lipstick she absolutely nailed. With the dark eyes hair, and complexion, she used very vividly colored shades of lipstick in the red range to great effect, and I know she turned heads. Her hair was done up in that moderate (not full) beehive look. But she did sometimes wear her hair down, too.
She wore pearls, they did look sensational on them. I so regret that pearls are somewhat stodgy and out of fashion to some. And she had a nice set of them that my father gave her from being stationed in or visiting Japan.
And she always wore pearls, jewels (that dangled and sparkled) and occasionally, moderate hoops. I think the large pearls were her favorites.
The overall effect of her was enchanting to me in her elegance and whenever I saw this famous Kennedy picture, I see my mother as she appeared to me on those nights:
And the entire house would be filled with the scent of "Shalimar". In the years since then, I can still see her as I looked up at her, much as Jackie must have seemed to her little boy grabbing her pearls!
So yes. I sure do miss that ceremony. I think it had value, but I understand much of it is simply nostalgia, and that's okay with me too.
That notion in this context it not at all unseemly.
Your post is an essay in its own right and bespeaks a discipline normal people seek and enjoy.
Dave’s Depot & Diner has been conceived to amplify that mindset.
Massive transport under strict rules, yet with pleasant hospitality and GREAT food.
That’s the idea, and from where I am sitting it may very well happen here in 5 years.
Your post and this topic reminded me of a restaurant I went to some years ago that was along railroad tracks (the south shore line which ends in South Bend). It was the kind of place, even in the early 1990’s where you’d expect Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin to suddenly show up. Vintage photos show many people dressed up over the years and the lake perch was incredible. Phil Schmidts of Whiting IN has been closed for 20 years or more now.
Actually it was along the amtrak and other tracks near Lake Michigan, not the south shore.
After having my own business and many failures before I got success. Don’t start a business for what you like. Star a business that customers want. How many people will want to buy meals to enjoy the railroad?
Gonna be tough. Nobody buys train sets any more. You’ll have to make it a destination like Oshkosh. Go see the Golden Spike in Omaha.
Bbq pork steaks, fried potatoes and onions, baked beans…..
Italian beef hoagies…
I like the concept...go for it, FRiend!
Dang. I love those kinds of places, and feel a peculiar sadness at their demise, same as the death of a tree I have come to know.
They had a place in my state, the “El Morocco” which was widely known and had that vibe for attracting celebrities, with all the black and white autographed images of them all over the walls, pretty famous ones, too. Definitely had the vibes of the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. That era.
Another one in Boston I had the pleasure to take my wife to for one of our anniversaries was at the Cafe Budapest. It was run by two famous elderly sisters who had tattoos and had survived Auschwitz. The atmosphere was very European, red wall, Hungarian food. During the evening, the two elderly sisters, dressed to the nines and wearing jewelry, would make the rounds. When I was there, they stopped at every table and chatted with the diners. I found it to be very charming, though quite expensive.
Yeah. I miss those places.
You were almost right but it was the Harvey House and the Harvey Girls you were thinking of.
There is a fascinating write-up on the Fred Harvey Company and the Harvey House chain which catered to the railroading public. It can be found on a site which is used for all kinds of research :)
I have dabbled in a few and failed. What is best about this one is the neutral nature and age-wide appeal. My part is forming the idea and turning it over to competent parties.
Add miniature trains running around the restaurant. Maybe a screen or two showing train trips from the conductor view or side window.
Use train whistles to signal waitresses when food is ready or a new customer has been seated.
Maybe serving carts and/or clean up carts that look like cabooses.
And of course a hobo greeting the customers.
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