What do you do with an old rail car once the tracks under it are gone? For years, the one parked off AL-53 near Capshaw didn't have an answer. It sat there through subdivisions filling in on both sides, through the Publix opening down the road, through enough seasons that most people driving past it stopped wondering. Then, in March 2026, it became a working kitchen. Soul Train Station opened at 5572 AL-53, and the rail car isn't a prop out front. It's the dining room.
That detail lands differently once you know why there was a rail car sitting on AL-53 in the first place. Harvest wasn't built around a highway. It grew up around a rail line the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway ran south from Fayetteville, Tennessee, through what's now Capshaw and Toney, back when the community's center of gravity was the railroad rather than the road. That line got pulled up in 1929, and the right-of-way went to the Madison County Highway Department. Highway 53 runs close to where those tracks used to be. A century later, an actual piece of rolling stock came back to the same corridor to serve fried chicken and mac and cheese. It's not a theme. It's the neighborhood's own history showing up at dinner.
What you're actually getting in that car
The train-car seating at Soul Train Station is a Sunday thing, open during regular service hours from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and it can also be booked for private events like birthdays and reunions if you plan ahead. Seating in the car is limited, so if that's the point of the visit, don't treat it as a walk-in plan.
The kitchen doesn't run a normal restaurant week. Current hours are:
- Sunday: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Monday through Wednesday: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
- Thursday through Saturday: closed
That schedule catches people off guard the first time, especially if you're used to restaurants that lean into weekends. Soul Train Station is built more for a Sunday lunch or an early-week dinner than a Friday night out. The menu leans into fried chicken, potato salad, mac and cheese, a roll, and sweet tea as the anchor plate, with purple collard greens as the side that keeps coming up in conversation because it's not something most soul food menus bother with. There's also a discount for veterans, which matters on a stretch of road that carries a fair number of Redstone commuters home every evening.
The rest of the corridor didn't show up overnight either
Soul Train Station is the newest name on AL-53, but it's not the only reason the drive between Capshaw and the Nick Davis Road area has gotten more interesting. Two stops worth building a routine around:
RD's Smokehouse Barbecue has been serving off Nick Davis Road since 2010, well before the rail car found its second act. It's not flashy from the parking lot, but it's carried an average rating above 4.7 stars across hundreds of reviews for years running, and the brisket and smoked wings are the reason regulars keep coming back rather than driving into Huntsville for barbecue. If you want proof that Harvest can support a serious kitchen without a highway-facing sign or a marketing budget, RD's is the proof.
LawLer's Barbecue runs a location at 5856 AL-53 as part of a small regional chain with more than a dozen locations across Alabama and Tennessee, which makes it the more predictable stop on the corridor. It's the one you pick when you want a Family Pack on a Tuesday and don't want to think too hard about it.
And then there's Harvest Square, the Publix-anchored center at 5850 Highway 53 that's less a restaurant story and more the reason the corridor works at all. It's the errand stop, not the destination, but residents who shop there regularly describe it as feeling like their own pantry, and that kind of loyalty to a grocery store is worth noting in a community that didn't have a center like this a decade ago. Harvest Square gives the corridor its anchor tenant the same way the rail line once gave the community its center.
Why this matters more than a list of new openings
Put those pieces next to each other and a pattern shows up that's easy to miss if you only hear about one opening at a time. Harvest's food scene isn't accumulating randomly along AL-53. It's filling in a corridor that already had a reason to exist, the same corridor the old rail line ran through before the tracks came up in 1929. The businesses landing there now, from a decade-old barbecue joint off Nick Davis Road to a brand-new restaurant built inside a rail car, are following the same route the community's original economy did.
That's a different story than "Harvest got a new restaurant." It's closer to Harvest's food scene catching up to its own geography. For years, if you lived off Jeff Road or in Monrovia Meadows and someone asked where to eat, the honest answer was a drive south toward Madison or into Huntsville proper. That's no longer the accurate answer, and the AL-53 corridor between Capshaw and the Harvest Square area is the reason why.
None of this means treating Soul Train Station as a Saturday destination. The hours don't support that plan, and showing up on a Saturday expecting the doors to be open is the fastest way to end up back at RD's instead. But planned right, a Sunday drive up AL-53 can start with lunch in the rail car and run through Harvest Square for whatever the week actually needs. RD's or LawLer's can be a separate weeknight stop when it fits your schedule. That's not a special occasion. That's just what living along this stretch of road looks like now.
If you're bringing someone through Harvest for the first time and want them to remember it, a Sunday lunch inside an actual train car does more work than most conversation. Fried chicken in a rail car isn't something most visitors have done before, and it says more about this community's history than a highway sign ever could.
Alice Battle has spent three decades paying attention to details like this one along Harvest's roads, because the same instinct that notices a rail car finding new purpose is the instinct that matters when you're pricing a home or reading a neighborhood correctly. If Harvest is on your radar for reasons that go beyond a Sunday lunch, Alice Battle is glad to talk it through.
