Within the railroad industry, the most powerful labor unions were exclusive craft organizations that concentrated on defending the privileges of a few skilled workers. Data from archaeological work conducted by Sonoma State University during the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project is used in an historical materialist exploration of class-consciousness among railroad workers in a late-19th-century working-class neighborhood in West Oakland, California. Comparing aspects of diet and dining, this study focuses on divisions among the railroad workers along the lines of craft-skill and nativity, examining the ways skilled craft unionists used the assumptions of Victorian ideology to organize against both their employers and other groups of workers, especially immigrants.