Board For Breakfast

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #152

This is a diner right off I-78 in Clinton, New Jersey, on the way to Phillipsburg:

Here’s the view from inside the parking lot:

We used to eat here when I was a kid, and I thought maybe the train car was a prop. But it’s a real train car!

A Facebook post on the diner turns up this wonderful comment:

My father was a regular at the Union Gap in the early 70’s. He was an engineer on the Jersey Central RR and was instrumental in helping Tony and Carl obtain the car. I have a video he took the day it was delivered.

Someone else added, “Watched part of that car being delivered in person.”

The Union Gap—full name, Union Gap Restaurant—was the name of this place before it became the Clinton Station Diner in the early 2000s. But the Union Gap goes back much further: from another commenter, “my mother worked there when it first opened before the train was put on it came in some time around 1973.”

Someone knows a unique detail, too:

It’s the Beulah observation car from the famous blue comet trains that ran to the shore. This car was involved in a serious wreck in the pine barons, but was unscathed because it was the last car on the train.

A bit of non-train history:

My old boss, Mike Zambas owns that diner. Years ago before he purchased it, the feds raided the place during dinner service. The doors were locked and for almost 20 years the place sat exactly the way it was when it was closed. Tables still had the dishes, condiments and everything on them from the night of the raid. The Zambas family redid the entire inside and reopened it after about 6 months of renovations.

And someone has some fun old-man-yells-at-cloud thoughts, which are not wrong:

The quality of life as measured in the ambience created by one’s surroundings has plummeted since the older days. Sitting in this car while dining, you can feel the quality all around you in the precision and beauty of the moldings, the “plushness” in the air. Today’s plastic, glass and steel is cold, inert, and completely disengaging. Love this train car for what it is; a reminder that we’re headed in the wrong direction.

A screenshot from a book proves its provenance:

That’s neat. A little piece of history reused, and a fitting one, since although this train car wasn’t a dining car, many actual train cars were and are.

Bonus: here’s another restaurant, Rod’s in Morristown, New Jersey, in a boutique hotel, with an integrated old train car!

I’ve got more for you on restaurants and train cars, but that’s for another installment of this series!

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Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #2

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #8

Dine Like It’s 1950 in Warrenton, Virginia

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