I've been in rehab (that's writers rehab not AA).

Yes Larry the Dining Cars are still there, but you're making me get ahead of my story so let's go back to 1946 for awhile.

Dining Cars Continued

Ed Mullen’s wasn’t completely out of his mind. He had worked as a steward on a real dining car and he knew that the old cars were surplus that could be had for virtually nothing. All he had to do was haul them up the coast from Los Angeles where they originally ran and find a piece of property to put them on. Some twenty years earlier a crazy Dane named Anton Andersen had made a name for himself in the town of Buellton selling split pea soup from a tiny diner. Why wouldn’t the novelty of two dining cars sitting at the side of Highway 101 between Los Angeles and San Francisco attract a following?

The ten acres just north of town was relatively cheap allowing Mullen’s room for expansion if his business succeeded, so why not give it a try? No, Mullen’s wasn’t crazy, he was just ahead of his time and a little too far out of town. When people were reaching Buellton they were looking for the pea soup place, not a pair of dining cars. If they were arriving from the south they had already stopped and eaten at Andersen’s. If they were coming from the north they blew by the dining cars as if it were a mirage, never expecting to see such a place in the middle of nothing. By the time they hit the brakes they were in the middle of Buellton and there was the pea soup place along with a lot of other choices for food, gas and restrooms.



By the middle of 1949 Mullen’s decided to give it up and let someone else have a try. He leased the restaurant to Louise Lane, who despite her connection to Superman, didn’t last long either. From there it was a succession of attempts to make the novel idea work and a series of train wrecks in the form of failed businesses in the dining cars.



Stay on track, there's still more to this Dining Car story.

C Cragg