DID YOU KNOW?
Harvey House Railroad Depot
in Barstow, California
of Route 66. Suddenly, tourists were coming by rail and car, both in proximity to the depots. In some cases, Harvey hotels and restaurants found themselves sandwiched between the two.
Anyway, the 1920s and 1930s found Fred Harvey the company in three southwest Route 66 states and associated cities, including New Mexico and California. There were also operations along Route 66 in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Illinois, but not at the same level of grandeur as found farther west. Those Harvey House hotels and restaurants in the southwest became convenient stopovers for early motorists along “The Mother Road” (Route 66). Their locations and spacing were driven earlier by the railroad when locomotives could not go fast or for long distances without stopovers. Between Las Vegas, New Mexico, and Los Angeles, there were no fewer than a dozen of these, spaced on average 100 miles apart. They were vital parts of each city’s economy, providing jobs to chefs, busboys, Harvey Girls, and others.
The Fred Harvey Company could not help but be successful in the early Route 66 era due to needing accommodations and restaurants. Having two pipelines of potential customers, trains, and the automobile, along with hungry local residents, put the Fred Harvey Company in an enviable market position. Sensing that the company had to evolve to meet changes in transportation, sons Ford and Byron, and then later grandson Freddy, drove the company in new directions years after the death of Fred.
Now, with airplanes now part of travel as well as the auto, things were ripe for changes in the hospitality industry, which brought on competition, and the train industry improved now having diesel trains instead of steam ones, and there wasn’t as much of a need for the trains to stop to resupply every 100 miles for a layover at the depots, plus cars were improving to where they could drive further before refueling, which ultimately affected the Fred Harvey Company at these depot hotel/ restaurants with less people eating and not in need of accommodations. Later in the 1930s, grandson Freddy Harvey tried to reconcile growing air travel, with an early intermodal transcontinental service that included flying by day and trains by night, shuttling passengers coast to coast in what was then a record two days. As planes improved, reliance on trains to supplement travel faded.