Aerogipsy posted:"Spaghetti Warehouse is an Italian restaurant geared towards families with 13 locations in 6 U.S. states. Each restaurant has a trolley car in the dining room and patrons are able to sit in the car."
We visit the Columbus OH location regularly. The food is awesome, by the way!
Aerogipsy,
This restaurant chain was totally off my radar. Thanks! Like your OH location, many of these eateries get high marks for food. So much for the greasy spoon image. It looks like the different Spaghetti Warehouse restaurants contain a wide variety of cars -- wouldn't it be nice if they were found locally? Only one looked fabricated.
From an architecture/function/design standpoint, one has to ask: what is this fascination with bringing the outdoors indoors? It seems to go beyond simply providing a cheap "building" by repurposing a vehicle, although many of the earliest diners started out that way.
And why this obsession with saving so many trolleys at the expense of repurposing more rail cars? Here's a possible theory: during the depression many trolley and street railway lines failed therefore making cars available. Even during a depression, the saying goes, people have to eat, so restaurants continued to be opened and these cars were available for affordable restaurants, houses, sheds, etc. On the other hand, I would assume that the Class 1 railroads may have struggled but probably were in a better position to keep their rolling stock running. And they probably were motivated to keep the older units going to save money. Other factors might be the cost to move and probably greater ease in reconfiguring a trolley as opposed to a rail car. Surviving rail car restaurants seem to stay intact more as dining establishments -- perhaps because they actually were designed as restaurants.
Just some blathering on a fantastic-weather holiday. Thanks all for making this an interesting (and colorful) thread. Time to go outside!
Tomlinson Run Railroad
