![Colorado Railroad Museum engineer Mark Huber holds a pizza he baked in a restored steam locomotive](https://www.thedrive.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/28/train-pizza.jpg?w=1920)
![Colorado Railroad Museum engineer Mark Huber holds a pizza he baked in a restored steam locomotive](https://www.thedrive.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/28/train-pizza.jpg?w=1920)
Cars are not crock pots. Try to cook with them, and you’ll end up with an inedible mess of petrochemicals, if not a slightly crispy Lamborghini. Trains however may be another matter, as YouTuber Mark “Hyce” Huber discovered while seeing if a vintage steam locomotive could cook one of everyone’s favorite foods: Pizza.
While easy to bake from your freezer, pizza is almost always better from a restaurant for a multitude of reasons, one of them being heat. Most home ovens don’t go far past 500 degrees Fahrenheit, while commercial ovens operate at 800-plus according to Forno Piombo. This heat is key to crisping up a thin crust, all while baking the pie through without burning it. In theory, any superheated compartment with a hole in the side could be used as a pizza oven—such as the firebox of a steam engine.
Huber tested this on a restored Denver & Rio Grande Western K-37 class steamer, a narrow-gauge 2-8-2 used in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Seeing as the engine’s “coal blast furnace” of a firebox reaches temperatures of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, it stands to reason it’d be a superb pizza oven. Huber went all-in on the experiment with a scratch-made pizza, using homemade dough and sauce, fresh mozzarella, and a layer of sharp Parmigiano Reggiano—like that parm stuff in the shaker in your fridge, except it tastes like cheese and not sawdust.
![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hi6-R6vLTS4/hqdefault.jpg)
Loaded into the firebox during the start on wood, the pizza takes less than two minutes to cook fully, with a nice char on its underside. A taste test reveals it to be a darned solid pizza—Huber says it’s not as good as his regular home bake, but it’s still a pie of high caliber going by the reactions of his fellow railroaders. It’s good enough that Huber and company believe the train itself deserves a bite, so they toss in a sacrificial slice as tribute. Feeding your trains to honor them is something of a tradition, apparently.
A second round over a full coal flame goes less well, with the pizza burning onto the shovel and coming off a mess. Still, the pizza was edible, tasty, and proves a train can be used as a pizza oven in a pinch. They’re not about to start replacing the ovens at your local wood-fired parlors, what with their size and supercar-rivaling prices, but train-cooked pizzas would be a memorable novelty as dinners go. I’ll take one with pepperoni, black olives, and pineapple, please.
Ever cooked something unusual with a vehicle? Tell me about it at james@thedrive.com