RUTLAND — Midway Diner

The Midway Diner, Rutland, VT

For more than sixty years, the Midway Diner on South Main Street in Rutland was the kind of place that didn’t need to advertise. The truck drivers knew it. The deer hunters knew it. The night shift workers knew it. And when the bars closed at midnight, there was a line from the door to the road.

Eddie Copps opened it in 1949 at 120 South Main Street. It ran around the clock, seven days a week. After Vermont Transit’s terminal on Merchants Row closed for the evening, the Midway became the official after-hours bus stop — the garage was right across Clover Street. In those years, Rutland had as many as five or six truck terminals, and drivers knew the Midway by heart. Howe Scale Company workers had exactly thirty minutes for lunch. The Midway had everything prepped before they walked through the door.

In 1962, Copps sold it to Frank Trombetta Senior, who expanded the operation and added a gas station out front. John Valente came to Rutland from Italy as a young boy, started at the Midway as a dishwasher, and worked his way up to co-owner alongside Frank Trombetta Jr. The place was so much a home away from home for locals that some regulars even had their own spots.

In 1996, with competition increasing from chain restaurants and changing dining patterns around Killington, the original diner car was sold to Thomas Tresch and trucked out of Rutland. A new building seating 125 went up at the same address, set farther back from the road. Same name. Same gravy on the fries.

The new Midway ran for another seventeen years. On August 18, 2013, John Valente sat at the counter near closing time while someone got a photograph. The clock on the wall read 2:30 — a half hour past the planned end, because nobody could quite bring themselves to leave.

With the original Pullman car long-since sent on its journey to storage areas in Orwell, Brandon, and Pennsylvania…the final Midway Diner building now operates as the Vermont Tap House. The shirt below carries a photograph of a full moon rising over the Midway in that final building, taken shortly after the last cup was poured.

Rutland Signature Design shirt:

https://shop.myhometownvermont.com/…/rutland-vermont…

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