Chew, chew, chew:

It's the dining train

By Conrad deFiegre
Southern Minnesota Correspondent

At 6 p.m. Sunday, 144 Iowans will board a pair of refurbished dining cars for the inaugural passenger run of the Cedar Valley Railroad.

During a three-hour jaunt along the Cedar River from Osage to Nashua and back, they'll eat prime rib, Cornish game hen and crab Newburg and become part of a new chapter in railroad history.

The Star Clipper exclusion train's second run will start from Minnesota, loading at 7 p.m. Wednesday in Glenville, near the northern terminus of the 113-mile line.

"There's none other like it in the Midwest," said Jack Haley, a former Union Pacific brakeman who is president of the 7-month-old railroad based in Osage, his home town. "It's first-class elegant dining experience out of the 1940's and '50s: eight-piece settings, candles, China stemware and silver on white tablecloths."

The cost is $35 per passenger.

Feeding flatlands from the Iowa-Minnesota border region such meals on wheels while highballing through places like Lyle, Minn., and Floyd, Iowa, is Haley's latest money-making idea. He already has succeeded in the freight business on tracks that the Illinois Central Gulf (ICG) abandoned.

He said his fledging railroad, bought last September for $3 million, is carrying four times the cargo, mostly corn and soybeans, that the ICG hauled between Albert Lea, Minn., and Waterloo, Iowa.

Business has been so good, in fact, that last month Haley announced an agreement to buy the ICG's Chicago-Omaha line for $75 million. That would create an 800-mile railroad empire for a man whose great grandfather helped drive the Union Pacific's golden spike at the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 and whose father and grandfather were Union Pacific conductors.

Haley, 49, spent five years as a brakeman before joining the armed forces. He later became a real estate developer in Omaha and Washington, D.C.

"But I followed the Class I railroads in the professional journals," he said. "A year ago in January I found they were selling their feeder lines. It's a whole new area for entrepreneurs."

There are more than 400 railway short lines in the United States, most at least 100 years old. The Cedar Valley is among the first of a new breed running on feeder track abandoned by big interstate lines.

And it's the first in the Midwest to have dining service, Haley said.

Haley said he hopes to eventually run the dining train every night. For now it will operate Wednesdays through Sundays, with three excursions from Glenville and four from Lyle.

Further information can be obtained by writing to Marge Storm, excursion coordinator, in care of the Cedar Valley Railroad in Osage, Iowa.