Folks in Springfield, Vt., seem to have really warmed up to Kingston's old Royal Diner since it reopened in the Green Mountain state, attached to a museum dedicated to Corvette automobiles.

Now the Springfield Royal Diner, the fully-restored stainless steel eatery is featured in the Spring 2005 issue of state-run Vermont Life magazine.

John Lazenby, managing editor of the quarterly publication, said the story was offered by a writer and it seemed interesting, "a diner with a museum."

It opened there in May 2003, after its interstate journey from state Route 28 in the town of Ulster.

The diner has been reunited with some of its former patrons, including Norm Gassett, 78, who told Vermont Life he ate in the Royal while it was in Ulster County, when he traveled the region servicing the electronic controls of ski lifts.

Photographer Jon Gilbert Fox, who took the pictures accompanying the magazine piece, also recognized the place.

"I grew up in and around Kingston, from 1955 ... to 1968," he said Friday, by phone, adding he'd eaten there over the years. "I walked in (on assignment to photograph the Royal) and said this diner looks kind of familiar and asked where it came from. They said Kingston."

The diner, one of only a handful built around 1955 by the Mahoney Diner Co. of Elizabeth, N.J., operated continuously in Ulster County until Dec. 1, 2001, when surviving owner Lee Konjas decided to retire.

In February 2002, a crew lead by a Rhode Island-based diner preservationist group, prepared the 28-ton diner for its trip at a cost of about $10,000. The new owners, Corvette enthusiast Matthew Alldredge, along with his business partners, paid another $22,000 to buy it.

A year before the planned opening, Alldredge said he and his partners were in the market for a new diner. That could have brought the project cost to roughly $750,000. He estimated the team saved between $300,000 and $400,000, and a fine bit of history, by moving the Royal to Vermont.

The Royal had been moved once before, about 35 years earlier.

On one of his final days behind the counter, in December 2001, Konjas told the Freeman he and his business partner, Angelo Papaleonardos, bought the place in 1961, six years after it opened at 516 Albany Ave.

They ran it there until 1967, when, as Konjas puts it, "business dried up," then moved outside the city limits.

In Vermont, Alldredge and company estimate as many as 77,500 people will visit the combined diner and Precision Valley Corvette Museum annually.

Originally published online here: http://www.dailyfreeman.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=14365157&BRD=1769&PAG=461&dept_id=74969&rfi=6