Why Do Classic Diners Look Like Railcars?

Diners started out as mobile “night lunch” wagons similar to today’s food trucks. In the 1880s and 1890s, lunch wagons sold inexpensive food—coffee, sandwiches and snacks—to workers on night shifts when regular restaurants were closed.

The first lunch wagons served food from windows and customers ate outside. Larger “eat-in” wagons appeared in the late 1880s, featuring full kitchens, counters and room for patrons to sit or stand inside. As lunch wagons got bigger, they looked increasingly like train cars—elongated rectangles with two sets of wheels.

At the turn of the 20th century, lunch wagons ditched their wheels and became stationary “lunch cars” that were open 24 hours a day. Manufacturers started building prefabricated lunch cars and shipping them via rail, contributing to their boxcar-like dimensions. Two of the most influential early lunch car manufacturers were the P. J. Tierney Co. of New York—which introduced the long lunch counter with stools—and Jerry O’Mahony Company of New Jersey.

O'Mahony’s innovation was to place the door in the center of the car, flanked by two sets of long windows, a classic diner layout that remained unchanged for decades.

As the story goes, a journalist wrote an article about O'Mahony’s booming lunch car business in 1924. He felt the name “lunch car” didn’t do justice to the roomier, stylish models built by the New Jersey company. The journalist suggested “dining car” as a nod to dining cars on passenger trains. At the time, train companies competed for customers by offering gourmet, white-tablecloth meals for passengers. There was nothing “gourmet” about lunch-car grub, but the new name stuck. O'Mahony and other lunch car manufacturers started calling their boxcar-shaped eateries “dining cars,” which was later shortened to “diner.”

The golden age of the diner arrived in the 1940s, when manufacturer Sterling Diners of Massachusetts introduced its iconic streamliner look. Many diners of the World War II-era featured shiny chrome exteriors with smooth, rounded edges and resembled the futuristic train cars and airplanes of the time.