The California Railroad's Surprising Impact on Food and Civil Rights

For her series California Foodways, Lisa Morehouse is reporting a story about food and farming from each of California’s 58 counties.

Riding the Amtrak’s California Zephyr from the Bay Area to Chicago had always been an item on passengers Jamie Thomas and Shreya Jalan’s bucket lists.

“I always took trains with my dad,” Thomas told KQED. “My fondest memories are sitting with him, chatting or getting dinner together. It was a very good place to connect with people.”

This includes strangers. The dining car, where Thomas was seated next to fellow Bay Area resident Jalan, practices “community seating.”

“The number of stories we get to hear and exchange, I think it’s really beautiful,” said Jalan, who didn’t know Thomas before the trip.

Growing up in California, fourth graders learn about the transcontinental railroad and the mostly Chinese laborers who laid the track eastward from Sacramento, leveling, drilling and tunneling through the Sierra Nevada to connect with the westward tracks. The so-called “Big Four” railroad tycoons behind the construction — the Central Pacific Railroad — are also well-known. However, some of this history can get overlooked, like how the railroad – and its connection to food – shaped much of California’s story.

Trains would go on to make the Golden State a powerhouse. But innovation went hand in hand with exploitation of land and rail workers, whose resistance against discrimination led to breakthroughs in labor and civil rights. As author and archivist, Benjamin Jenkins put it, “The railroad really revolutionizes just about every part of California’s politics, society and economy.”

Laying The Tracks

Some of the routes of the Zephyr line parallels that of the first transcontinental railroad. One of the most beautiful train routes in the United States, Zephyr’s California path alone is stunning. Leaving Emeryville, near Oakland, it hugs the Bay before passing under the Carquinez Bridge and heading into the Delta, snaking by islands and waterways. After stopping in Sacramento, it climbs through California’s foothills, then into the Sierra Nevada.

On shorter routes, a lot of trains have cafe cars with drinks, snacks and 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. Diners mingle over white table cloths, flower vases and plastic plates.

By the time the Central Pacific 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 Big Four had big plans. They purchased a small railroad line, the Southern Pacific, and expanded it dramatically, stretching from the Bay Area down to Los Angeles and across hundreds of miles 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 — known as the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway — later reached Los Angeles, it caused a rate war. Tickets from Chicago to LA dropped from $125 to $1. Los Angeles went from cowtown to boomtown.

Back then, the train offered few amenities and people packed their own food to avoid terrible roadhouse meals.

“Most of the people would make fried chicken and get on the train. They’d trade some of that fried chicken for pillows and [other goods],” said Lawrence Dale, who worked for the BNSF Railway Company for more than 42 years.

Standing at an exhibit at the Western American Railroad Museum in Barstow, Dale explained that the further the trains went, the less practical it was for passengers to bring all of their own food on a trip. And when there’s a business vacuum, someone will try to fill it. Enter Fred Harvey.

The museum takes up a section of what was once Barstow’s Harvey House, a restaurant designed for train passengers right off the railroad tracks. For a building that’s more than 110 years old, it’s beautiful with columns, decorative brick arches and shaded walkways.

In partnership with the Santa Fe railroad, Harvey built Harvey Houses every 100 miles. They served fancy cheeses, oysters, fruit, sirloin and generous slices of pie. Another big attraction: waitresses known as “Harvey Girls.”

Harvey Girls were young, single and almost always white.

“All I can tell you about Harvey Girls is they were young women out of the Midwest,” said Dale. “They were brought in here by Fred Harvey and weren’t allowed to date. They weren’t allowed to do nothing except serve the people.”

Of course, plenty of Harvey Girls did marry and relocate to farms and ranches across the West. While they were Harvey Girls, they worked long hours, lived in dorms under the watchful eyes of house mothers and were expected to meet strict standards of decorum and image, down to their uniform.

White gloves, white full-cover apron with a black garment underneath.

“Bow in the back of the hair,” Dale said, pointing to a display. “They were all supposed to be dressed alike.”

For passengers, eating at a Harvey House was an elevated dining experience, but it was more efficient than leisurely. Trains called in passengers’ orders ahead by telegraph.

Say a westbound train pulled into Needles, a city in San Bernardino County. The conductor would come through the cars, taking orders and contact the next Harvey House down the line in Barstow, letting staff know how many people planned to eat and what time they’d arrive.

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

Harvey Houses were 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, according to Ty Smith, director of the California State Railroad Museum.

“Dining was at the heart of the transition from conveyance to experience,” he said.

Sacramento, a city rich in railroad history, is the perfect home for the museum, where kids wearing conductor’s hats and blowing train whistles mingle with adult rail buffs.

“We’re two blocks from mile marker zero, where the Central Pacific Railroad started building from west to east,” Smith said.

During the Gold Rush, trains transported picks and shovels and other goods from the city into the foothills to the miners.

Foodways are embedded throughout the museum, too. Smith pointed out a display that holds artifacts of a Chinese workers camp: a ginger jar, a tea cup, a rice bowl, a glazed stoneware jar that stored vinegars and sauces.

Even though Chinese workers made up 90% of the labor force for the Central Pacific Railroad, they were in segregated camps, according to Smith.

“The Chinese railroad workers didn’t get the same pay or food allowances that their Irish and other counterparts did,” he said.

Even this small display illustrates the racism baked into the building of the railroads: the chasm between people who owned the railroads and the people who worked on them.

The museum also has a sleeper car on a rocker to simulate the feeling of being on a train. It’s set up to show how the car would look both during the day and in the evening.

“During the day, the upper berths would be folded up. The lower berths serve as comfy seats,” said Smith.

At night, porters would unfold the upper berths and convert the seats to beds. Smith pointed to a little button passengers could push to call a porter.

Next to the sleeper car is a 1937 Cochiti dining car, which ran on Santa Fe’s Super Chief train between Chicago and Los Angeles.

“That gives us a chance to talk about what it was like to dine on a train during the golden era of rail travel,” Smith said.

In the narrow galley kitchen, it’s hard to imagine all the people needed to prepare three gourmet meals a day for 50 people.

“The chef, people doing prep, mise-en-place,” Smith enumerated. “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.”

Called to the dining room by chimes, passengers would sit among abundant flower arrangements and intricate Art Deco metalwork. They ate at tables with tablecloths and off of china with patterns that reflected the route: poppies in California and animal images inspired by Native American art in the Southwest.

Docent Allen Blum shared a menu for the Super Chief, including “ripe California colossal olives, grapefruit, orange and raisin fruit, swordfish steak, and poached salmon.”

Menus often reflected cuisines and ingredients along the route. Blum said the Super Chief carried politicians and stars from Walt Disney to Jack Benny to Marilyn Monroe.

“This was definitely considered first class,” he said.

Passengers on dining cars came to expect attentive service — one waiter per two tables. Smith explained that the businessman best known for railroad dining cars was George Pullman. He built and owned luxury train cars to appeal to passengers who wanted to travel in style, and he leased his cars to the railroads.

Smith said Pullman was a master at branding.

“Pullman is creating the romance of train travel,” he added. “To ride on a Pullman car means something, and this feeds his ability to lease these cars to the railroads.”

But Pullman built his business on the backs of the Black service workers he hired.

“It was a luxurious experience, but a completely racialized experience,” said Susan Anderson, history curator at the California African American Museum. “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, was provided by Black labor.”

Engines of resistance

White men held positions like engineer and conductor. The servant-type jobs — porter, steward, cook, maid and waiter — were reserved for Black people.

“George Pullman and the Pullman Company were explicit about this,” Anderson said. “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.”

Porters who did everything from turning down beds, carrying luggage and serving food were usually not addressed by their names. They were called “George” after Pullman.

Anderson said the subjugation of Black workers was a direct reflection of the way the U.S. economy was organized.

“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,” she said.

Many Black people saw railroad jobs as opportunities to broaden their horizons, bring money back home or leave Southern states altogether and move their families elsewhere.

“People who worked for the railroad got a lot of respect in the community,” said Anderson.

Her own family has a connection to railroad history. Anderson’s maternal great-grandfather was a chef on the railroad. His name was Edward Wilcox and his family was originally from Louisiana.

“They came to West Oakland in the late 19th century,” Anderson said. “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.”

By 1926, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of African American workers in the country, with over 10,000 porters and 200 maids.

According to Anderson, a lot of intellectuals worked as porters or waiters.

“There were college men who had no other employment opportunities in a racist economy,” she said.

The railroad workers 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 had fathers who were porters.

Railroad workers networked with each other across the country, sharing copies of Black-owned newspapers and other literature, including The Messenger, a political and literary magazine for Black people that was founded by A. Phillip Randolph, an influential civil rights activist and labor organizer.

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

In an oral history archived at the African American Museum & Library at Oakland, former Oakland-based Pullman porter Cottrell Laurence (C.L.) Dellums said, “There was no limit on the number of hours. The company unilaterally set up the operation of the runs.”

Dellums, whose late nephew, Ron Dellums, was a California congressman and former Oakland mayor, started working for Pullman in 1924. He said the salary at the time was $60 a month. Workloads for the porters was from 300 to over 400 hours a month.

“And they provided what we said was just enough rest between trips for the porter to be able to make one more trip,” Dellums said in the audio recording. “Anybody could take the porter’s job. Not only any kind of Pullman official — from the lowest to the highest — could take his job. Anybody traveling as a passenger, even though it might be the first trip they’ve ever been on a train, they could write him up and get him fired.”

Kept out of the American Railway Union, Black workers founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters & Maids in 1925. Dellums began signing up workers for the union despite the risks.

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

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. In 1937, they got a contract with Pullman, the first in history between a Black union and a large U.S. company. The union established an eight-hour work day, regulated work schedules and increased pay.

The Brotherhood influenced much more than service work on railroads. They were on the ground for many efforts during the civil rights movement, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington.

How railroads changed what and how we eat

Along the California Zephyr’s route through the outskirts of Sacramento, intricate irrigation systems and crops in perfect rows reveal the railroad’s impact on agriculture.

Archivist Benjamin Jenkins has written about the railroad’s impact on what we eat in his book, Octopus’s Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California.

The first entire railroad car full of oranges left Los Angeles for the Midwest in 1877, Jenkins told KQED. The oranges traveled on a refrigerator car packed with ice.

“It had to be re-iced 10 times going across the desert and the Badlands to make sure that the fruit didn’t spoil,” he said.

California’s produce industry took off a decade later.

“But once it starts, it really never looks back,” Jenkins said. “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.”

Railroads built “spur lines” off the main lines to access huge parts of the state.

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

Jenkins explained that in many states, the government had given the railroads loans and gifted them enormous tracts of land. The idea was that after the tracks were built, the railroads could sell off much of the land at a profit to farmers who would build packing houses right on the tracks. There were fewer land grants of this kind in California, but railroad companies still secured rights of way — sometimes over Native reservations — and became major landowners.

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

Railroads shipped out more than just produce.

“Full-color advertising starts to appear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries selling a packaged California lifestyle,” Jenkins said.

The Southern Pacific Railroad launched Sunset Magazine as a part of this campaign to draw people out west.

Wooden packing crates got loaded onto trains, sporting labels with illustrations of almost comically perfect produce.

“All of these images show a perpetually sunny Golden State, the fruits of paradise being grown underneath these purple snow-capped mountains,” said Jenkins.

The railroad even circulated California postcards, advertising the state as what Jenkins called a “new Eden,” an image that endured well beyond the heyday of train travel.

This story was produced as part of California Foodways with support from the Food and Environment Reporting Network and California Humanities, a nonprofit partner of National Endowment for the Humanities. Big thanks also go to the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, the library and archives at the California State Railroad Museum and Rachel Reinhard.