RAILROAD DINING, ART, AND CULTURE IN REVIEW BY JAMES D. PORTERFIELD Inside The Dining Car


YOU KNOW THIS NEW BOOK — a novel, mind you — caught my eye. A quick web search, an email, USPS Priority Mail, and three days later I was holding an autographed copy. What did I find? I confess to some snarky misgiving as


I settled in to read a book about life amid trains by someone unknown to “train world,” a tech entrepreneur and restau- rant manager turned novelist. What a pleasant surprise awaited me in The Dining Car by Eric Peterson.. An entertaining story unfolds around


Horace Button, a character acknowl- edged by the author to be an updated interpretation of Lucius Beebe. Button is a gastronome, a sharp-tongued food and travel writer for the fictional Sun- shine Trails magazine, someone bare- ly able to tolerate those lesser mortals who surround him. The setting is on and around Button’s private rail car Pioneer Mother, strikingly similar to Beebe’s ex- tant Virginia City. It is populated with a varied cast of characters, a chef and a steward, a magazine publisher and his staff, members of the Washington, D.C., elite, and with the plot twists you expect from a good yarn. And if a good story involving interest-


ing characters thrown together in a dra- matic moment (several of them, in fact) isn’t enough for your taste, consider this — you will emerge on page 341 with a thorough understanding of the operation of a private varnish, and the machina- tions of those who occupy it. And if you accept every novelist’s ambition, that


you “suspend disbelief” when reading a novel, you’ll do so in the company of Lu- cius Beebe, reportedly a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon. In an interview conducted by email,


we’ve invited Eric Peterson to account for his venture “out there on the line” to create his second novel. Here’s what he has to say for himself: R&R: How would you describe your level of railfan-dom? EP: On a scale of one to ten, I’m at


most a 1.5. If I’m driving a lonely stretch of highway and a train happens to pass by, that brightens my day, but I wouldn’t stop to photograph it, and I wouldn’t plan my day around visiting a popular railfan- ning location. In college I worked for Am- trak on the San Diego extra board and bounced to temporary assignments as both a ticket clerk and a baggage man in the San Diego, Del Mar, and Oceanside stations. In that job, I ran into a lot of hardcore railfans, and I can honestly say I’m not at all in their league. R&R: Where did your interest in pas- senger trains originate? EP: In 1967, my parents took my brother and me on the California Zeph- yr, from Oakland to Chicago. The hushed vista lounges, the white linen tablecloths in the dining car, the skill of the person- able waiters pouring milk and coffee, the excitement of sleeping on the train — it made an impression on me. In Chicago, as we were leaving the Zephyr, a locomo- tive engineer invited me up into his cab. Eight years later, looking for a summer


job in college, I saw an Amtrak train ap- proaching San Diego and thought, “Why not?” The district manager happened to be in San Diego that day. He invited me to travel to Los Angeles Union Station and apply for a job. When I did, the next day, he hired me on the spot. From that point on, I’ve associated trains more with work than play, although that’s changing lately. R&R: Why a novel centered on the operation and occupants of a private rail car?


EP: It facilitates a literary device I call


the “crucible” — that is, throw your char- acters into a container that holds them together, and then see how they act as things heat up around them. The private railroad car makes for a perfect crucible. The harder it is for the central characters to escape the crucible, the better. R&R: Did the idea start with wanting


to do something set on a private car? Or from the desire to write the story you did, and a private rail car made the ideal set- ting? EP: The idea of setting the story


aboard a private railroad car stems di- rectly from Lucius Beebe, who used a private car as his preferred mode of transportation. Because I subscribe to the “crucible” concept, I never imagined setting the story anywhere else. And, of course, the private car perfectly illus- trates the anachronistic nature of the character Horace Button and serves as a visual counterbalance to the Sunshine Trails editorial staff’s efforts to modern-


The Dining Car author Eric Peterson 64 APRIL 2017 • RAILFAN.COM


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