news-record.com

SEDALIA — The old rail car stopped rolling in 1937 when it arrived on the back of a truck to be placed beside Burlington Road in this small community. It’s a fixture along the old highway. Newspaper stories and passing motorists have made it a landmark and a marker.

At the rail car, you’re midway between Burlington and Greensboro. Hence, its former name, Midway Diner.

The demolition of so many old structures through the years, and some not-so-old ones, have made the rail car’s survival a wonder. It continues to exist without preservationists screaming for its protection. They, however, know it’s there.

“Have you seen anything like it?” asks Mike Cowhig, a Greensboro city planner in charge of local historic districts whose personal interests extend beyond the city limits. “It ought to be saved.”

A 1979 book about architectural resources in Guilford County described the diner as “extremely rare” because of its age — it was built between 1895 and 1900 — and its wood frame. Steel coaches and sleepers started replacing wood cars in about 1915.

The car was a roadside diner until the 1960s, when the county government told its owner Gertrude Goodall, who bought the diner in 1956 and lives in a house behind it, that it needed costly repairs to meet building-code standards.

The diner wasn’t making much money at the time. Goodall wanted a beer license to boost revenue. The county said no because the diner was too close to a church. But the previous owner had sold beer, Goodall says.

She tried operating a flea market in the diner for several years. Now, she uses it for storage.

In 1998, the last time the newspaper featured the diner, Goodall talked of a willingness to sell the car for perhaps $50,000, but she says she just pulled that lofty figure out of the air because she really didn’t want to sell.

Now, she would be willing to listen to a offer for the artifact, which she believes has the original steel wheels tucked under it.

Goodall says the car was possibly made for the Pullman Co., by an Englishman named Thomas. Could she mean Perley Thomas, a Canadian who started a company in High Point early in the 20th century for building first streetcars and now buses?

Thomas streetcars went to a lot of places, including New Orleans, where the Desire line was the model for Tennessee Williams’ “Streetcar Named Desire.”

In the 1920s and 1930s, obsolete rail cars were in demand to be used as diners.

Greensboro had one on North Elm Street downtown. The old counter in the former Sedalia diner remains. Long ago, Greensboro and Burlington youth motored there in jalopies.

“We’d drive out there and get hot dogs. A lot of young people courted there,” says Ralph James Patton of Burlington, adding that he took his future wife there often.

While the car isn’t the beauty of old, there’s potential for its rehabilitation and use in a rail museum or park.

Cowhig says that, with the pace of development around the Burlington Road and Rock Creek Dairy Road intersection near the former diner, he’s surprised the old rail car has survived.

Should Greensboro acquire the old downtown rail freight yard near South Elm and McGee streets for a park, he says, the site would be an ideal spot for the antique.

In 1856, when the last spike was hammered in Greensboro on the North Carolina Railroad near what’s now the rail yard, wood coaches like the one at Sedalia stopped daily at the various depots beside the South Elm crossing.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net