He was like a kid who got to play with trains for the rest of his life.
But on a mild, blustery Sunday afternoon in Fremont, even Bruce Eveland had to do a little growing up.
That was when the Fremont Dinner Train, which he managed and co-owned for 24 years, pulled onto its gravel platform for the final time. When the suit-and-tie-clad train junkie had to give passengers in Nebraska his final address.
“I’m gonna have to start over with a new group of people,” Eveland said, with eyes welling and a crack in his voice. “It’s gonna be hard to kind of pick up and move, but it needs to be done.”
Declining attendance forced Eveland and a group of co-investors to take their operation south, to Baldwin City, Kan., earlier in the year. After attracting nearly 10,000 passengers annually at its peak, the dinner train’s attendance dipped to about 6,000 in 2011, and Eveland said the number was significantly less by this October.
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The move made sense businesswise, but for Eveland -- whose family will remain in Nebraska while he works in Kansas -- the final 18-mile ride on the train he made his own was anything but easy. Co-owner Ira Schreiber said he could recall his partner missing maybe a dozen rides in a quarter-century.
When her boss’s voice finally gave out Sunday, 22-year crew member Holly Nielson said she had to grab the microphone from his hands.
“I asked him not to do that,” she said later, of Eveland’s speech. “And then he took the microphone and went and did anyway.”
All the while, as late-afternoon diners made their last descent onto the platform that’s more of a small hill with railroad tracks, crew members, entertainers and Schreiber could be found tossing around the same word.
Bittersweet.
* * *
“I always accuse my grandparents of creating this problem.”
Eveland’s “problem,” of course, was more of an obsession.
The longtime railroad enthusiast remembers journeying from rural Elmwood to Cincinnati as a young boy -- in a passenger train where he fondly recalls his grandparents dressing up in formal attire before dinner. Those were simpler times, he says, back when “the elegance of the diner” was custom -- when grandma wouldn’t think to enter the diner car without first throwing on a fresh dress, grandpa without a suit and tie.
Stepping onto the Fremont Dinner Train more than 50 years later, you’d have thought the evening formality hardly was a thing of the past.
The white tablecloths, tables and chairs – no booths – and an emphasis on service had been the standard in Fremont since the late 1980s. So had the three-course meals – perhaps a salad, prime rib and a baked potato and an apple crisp for dessert, though passengers could choose between three or four meal options. Entertainment came in the form of murder mysteries or live theater shows. Passengers might feel like characters in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” or maybe Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express.” Younger ones might recall “Silver Streak” along the way.
“It captures, I think, the essence of rail travel,” Eveland said, of the latter film. “Because you have people traveling in sleeping cars, you have people eating in dining cars, people enjoying the lounge car. It gives you a glimpse of all of that.”
With his dinner train, Eveland said, he and partners set out to do just the same, recreating the scene he remembered from his childhood.
That’s minus the sleeper cars, of course -- though the idea of a bed and breakfast was floated around more recently.
* * *
Though it originally consisted of a single car purchased in Oklahoma City in 1988, by 2012, the dinner train had grown into a fleet. For the final run, about a hundred packed into the cars that once stood as windowless steel tubes.
Early on, Schreiber said, the investors had carpeting, wallpaper and climate control on the final cars installed themselves -- just like any business owner would.
“This is basically a restaurant like any other restaurant,” he said. “Only difference is, we roll.”
Schreiber, who now lives in Colorado, said an early source of pride came in the form of a liquor license. Amtrak secured the state’s first, and the dinner train came second after fears of rumbling through "dry" towns and counties became persistent.
And until Sunday, Eveland said, the dinner train was maybe the only one in the country in which passengers could legally gamble. Diners ripped open Pickle Cards after their meals.
With the move, though, the business partners have to start over. Obtain new licenses, hire new staff and learn a whole new routine.
The new dinner service -- and the renamed “Kansas Belle” -- are expected to open in November, though the owners say the target date is optimistic. They’ll be spending nearly $80,000 just shipping the cars south on trucks.
“If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing,” Schreiber said.
This time around, the partners will open their business to a market they say is five times the size of the current one. Baldwin City is located about 30 miles southwest of the Kansas City metro, and about 14 miles southeast of Lawrence, Kan.
“It’s not an ending,” Schreiber said. “It’s a beginning.”
* * *
Jamey Issler, Aly Eveland and Robin Waage gathered in the diner car to clean up after passengers one last time.
The last customer of the Fremont Dinner Train had left by then, and the three, along with Bruce Eveland’s nephew Kendall, stood alongside each other and began to quietly reminisce. Aly, Bruce’s daughter, broke into tears.
Some of the crew members had been on board for more than 20 years. Now their tenure with the Fremont Dinner Train had come to a halt.
Waage, of Fremont, offered one final thought.
“A family, we’ve become.”
