Here’s the Real Reason Why Diners Look Like Train Cars

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The combination of cramped booths, a shiny interior, and a menu filled with low-priced comfort foods is truly an American staple. Whether you’re on a road trip or looking for a bite to eat in the morning, you can never go wrong with a diner—especially any of these iconic diners. Besides their good food and even better prices, they’re also really easy to spot. The reason? Many look like train cars.

Diners actually started off mobile. In 1872, Walter Scott invented the first “night lunch wagon.” He would serve hot, inexpensive meals out of a horse-drawn wagon that he had converted into a car (similar to a modern-day food truck!). Customers would be served out of the wagon’s window and eat their food on the go. After becoming quite popular, the “night lunch wagon” sparked the creation of “rolling restaurants”—a few seats within a car that allowed you to eat while traveling to your destination. Soon after, these on-the-go restaurants started being built into train cars as well. Called “dining cars,” they featured rows of boldly colored booths lined up against the windows and chrome finishes to match the rest of the train. “Dining cars” was eventually shortened to just “diner.” (But that abbreviation doesn’t even compare to how these 15 restaurants changed their names.)

Jerry O’Mahony founded the factory that shipped all of the original pre-fabricated diners across the country, and built the first stationary diner in 1913, with the design modeled after the chrome look of a train car. Since diners were manufactured to be shipped by truck or train, it limited what shape they could be. The shape that made the most sense was that of a classic train car. Soon, diners started popping up all over the United States.

Modern diners today are shaped a little bit differently. But most still have chrome finishes and tightly arranged booths to give it that locomotive feel. If you enjoyed this trip down memory lane, here’s how 8 famous fast food restaurants first started out.