Pullman Company

“ When Pullman built the Pioneer he designated it A, little dreaming that eventually he might build enough cars to exhaust the letters of the alphabet. To-day the Pullman Company has more than six thousand cars in constant use. It operates the entire sleeping-car service and by far the larger part of the parlor-car service on all but half a dozen of the railroads of the United States and Canada, with a goodly sprinkling of routes south into Mexico. On an average night sixty thousand persons—a community equal in size to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, or South Bend, Indiana—sleep within its cars. ”

“ In order to help the Pullman workmen in their struggle with the Pullman Company, the American Railway Union declared what was in effect a boycott upon all railroads using Pullman cars. Nearly all the larger American railroads had entered into contracts with the Pullman Company, by which parlor and sleeping cars were to be used on their trains. ”

“ In forming the Pullman Company, the founder aspired to establish an organized system by which the traveling public might be enabled to travel in luxurious cars of uniform construction, adapted to both night and day requirements, without change between distant points, and over various distinct lines of railroads. ”

“ The sleeping-car business, in which I was interested, had gone on increasing so rapidly that it was impossible to obtain cars enough to supply the demand. This very fact led to the forming of the present Pullman Company. The Central Transportation Company was simply unable to cover the territory with sufficient rapidity, and Mr. Pullman beginning at the greatest of all railway centers in the world—Chicago—soon rivaled the parent concern. He had also seen that the Pacific Railroad would be the great sleeping-car line of the world, and I found him working for what I had started after. ”

“ The success of the company engendered competition; its success resulted only in a comparison of service injurious to the imitators. Behind all this lay the fundamental reason for Pullman supremacy. Created to give a standardized service everywhere for the convenience of travelers, it was quickly apparent that competition was but a reversal to the old order—the more companies, the less uniform service.
About a month previous, the Mann Boudoir Company and the Woodruff Sleeping Car Company had joined hands and formed the Union Palace Car Company. ”

“ INVENTIONS AND IMPROVEMENTS
The invention of the folding upper berth combination by Mr. Pullman was the first of many contributions by himself, and in later years by the Pullman Company and those associated with it, to the development of railway travel. Sleeping cars for a number of years had given night accommodations to travelers; there was nothing new in the idea that a night journey required sleeping accommodations. But in the new and radical berth construction devised by Mr. Pullman lay the difference between impracticability and practicability—between discomfort and luxury. ”

“ Where formerly it was necessary for the traveler to change from car to car whenever and wherever one railroad connected with another line, the uniform service of the Pullman Company created a new and infinitely more desirable situation, for it was now possible to travel without inconvenience or interruption between practically any two points in the country regardless of the number of different railroads over whose tracks the traveler's ticket required passage. ”

“ In 1880, in obedience to the imperative demand of the Pullman company for increased shop-facilities, and to give effect to an idea he had long cherished of improving the social surroundings of the workmen, he founded near Chicago the industrial town of Pullman, which now contains over 11,000 inhabitants, 5,000 of whom are employed in the company's shops. ”

“ And one of the chief excuses for its existence is the flexibility of its service. A railroad in the South, with a large passenger traffic in the winter, or a railroad in the North, with conditions reversed and travel running at high tide throughout the hot summer months, could hardly afford to place the investment in sleeping and parlor cars to meet its high-tide needs, and have those cars grow rusty throughout the long, dull months. The Pullman Company, by moving its extra cars backward and forward over the face of the land in regiments and in battalions, keeps them all earning money. ”

“ One of the most interesting elements in the history of the Pullman car and the Pullman Company is the story of imitation and competition which for a period after the foundation of the parent company thrived and later disappeared. ”

“ The Mann car was developed to suit European railroads and European wants. A Belgian company was organized to introduce sleeping cars by contracts with railroad companies, somewhat like those of the Pullman Company in America. The Mann cars which were put in service in the United States between Boston and New York in 1883 were divided into eight compartments, some accommodating two persons, some four. ”

“ Few inventions have been financially so remunerative to the inventors as the Pullman palace car. It brought Mr. Pullman an immense fortune. The Pullman Palace Car Company, founded by Pullman in 1867, is one of the largest and most successful manufacturing concerns in America. It employs a capital of $40,000,000, gives work to fourteen thousand persons, furnishes sleeping-car service for 120,000 miles of railway, and operates over 2,000 cars. Mr. Pullman adopted plans for the vestibule car in 1887. He died at his home in Chicago, October 19, 1897. ”

“ Special occasions, like great conventions, call for extra Pullmans by hundreds; and because of the enormous capital that must be tied up, a single supplying company is best able to handle the problem. Still, big roads like the New Haven, the Milwaukee, and the Great Northern have been most successful in building and operating their own sleeping and parlor-car service. A great road like the Pennsylvania might do the same thing, and because of that possibility the Pennsylvania was one of the first roads in the country to make the Pullman Company pay it for the privilege of hauling its cars. ”

“ Railroad Commission of Texas v. Pullman Company
Argued: Feb. 4, 1941. --- Decided: March 3, 1941
In those sections of Texas where the local passenger traffic is slight, trains carry but one sleeping car. These trains, unlike trains having two or more sleepers, are without a Pullman conductor; the sleeper is in charge of a porter who is subject to the train conductor's control. As is well known, porters on Pullmans are colored and conductors are white. ”

“ Imagine a hotel with 260,000 beds and 2,950 office desks, and a total registration of 26,000,000 people each year. This is what the Pullman Company does, however, and incidentally it does it often at a mile a minute and in every state in the Union. The 2,950 offices where Pullman berths, seats, drawing rooms or compartments may be purchased include Quebec, Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Vancouver on the north; San Diego, El Paso, New Orleans, Key West, and Havana on the south; San Francisco on the west, and the seaboard towns of Maine on the east. ”

“ In order to extend to the public every courtesy consistent with lawful requirements and good business principles, the Pullman Company endeavors to provide prompt and careful attention to all requests for refund of fares where service paid for is not furnished, whether through the acts of its agents or employees or the passenger, or due to interruption of traffic. ”

“ All these things are taught the sophomore porters by a wrinkled veteran of the service; and they are minutely prescribed in the voluminous rule book issued by the Pullman Company, which believes that the first foundation of service is discipline. So the school and the rule book do not hesitate at details. They teach the immature porter not merely the routine of making up and taking down beds, and the proper maintenance of the car, but they go into such finer things as the calling of a passenger, for instance. Noise is tabooed, and so even a soft knocking on the top of the berth is forbidden. ”

“ The Pullman Company maintains, in addition to the great plant at Pullman, six repair shops situated at various convenient points throughout the country where cars are repaired and maintained in good condition. ”

“ The dreaded journey to New York becomes a mere holiday excursion in his delightful coaches, and, by the way, he will soon have a through line from Chicago to New York, in which a man need never leave his place from one city to the other.
The year 1867 marks the incorporation of Pullman's Palace Car Company, for the purpose of the manufacture and operation of sleeping cars. At the time of incorporation George M. Pullman owned all of the sleeping cars on the Michigan Central Railroad, Great Western [Canada] Railroad, and the New York Central Railroad lines, a grand total of forty-eight cars. ”

“ These men each week make personal inspection of cars in operation with the sole purpose of keeping the service up to the highest standard. In addition, a corps of electrical and mechanical inspectors constantly inspect and test the cars and their devices, at various places, and another corps of local inspectors carefully examine every departing and every incoming train with particular attention to the appearance and deportment of the car employees and the apparatus for heating, lighting and water.
The Pullman Company is today the greatest single employer of colored labor in the world. ”

“ Pullman towels rarely have a chance to wear out. Over a hundred thousand a year are condemned chiefly because of such usage, and, sad to relate, each year over half a million are "lost." A Pullman towel is a handy wrapping for a pair of shoes, but the annual lost charge amounts to nearly seventy thousand dollars. It is a charge that must be accepted by the company. It will not do to question a passenger's integrity.
All told, the investment by the Pullman Company in car linen amounts to $1,856,708.00, representing 6,597,714 separate pieces. ”

“ To the stockholders of the Pullman Car Manufacturing Company, who see in its organization innumerable opportunities for enriching themselves at the expense of the workman, it is a model town. But to the poor employees, who encounter at every turn the grasping hand of the monopoly, it is a model town symbolical of all that characterizes slavery. In the hands of the Pullman Car Manufacturing Company resides the entire property of the town. They not only own the water and gas works, and the houses, but also sell to their employees the very necessities of life. ”

“ The operation of a system of such magnitude as the Pullman Company necessitates an operating organization letter perfect in its detail. Such an organization cannot be built to order; it must be a development, the result of years of wearying experience and costly experiment. In the introduction to the official book of instruction provided to car employees of the company, occurs, above the signature of the general superintendent, this sentence: "The most important feature to be observed at all times is to satisfy and please passengers." ”

“ All of which is a preface to the statement that the Pullman Company, like any other large user of labor, regulates its wage scale by supply and demand. If it can find enough of the colored brethren competent and willing and anxious to man its cars at twenty-seven dollars and a half a month—with the fair gamble of two or three or four times that amount to come in the form of tips—it is hardly apt to pay more. ”

“ One characteristic of the Pullman business that is peculiarly significant is the average length of service of the employees. In a general way it may truly be said that from the car porter to the highest official every man who enters the business enters it as a life work. In most lines of business there is a variety of concerns operating along similar lines, and it is a natural step for a man to pass up from one company to another. ”

“ With the realization constantly before him that the most perfect service could be given only by the most radically improved equipment and the widest extension of this company's activities, Mr. Pullman identified the early years of organization with a development of the passenger car to a degree of comfort, convenience, safety, and luxury that passed popular comprehension. Nothing was too good for the Pullman car ”

“ It seems that in this day and land a man who goes from New York to Chicago or St. Louis is generally so well paid as to make it worth dollars to him to save hours in the journey. It is modern efficiency showing itself in railroad-passenger travel. But the differentials, having local territory to serve, as well as on account of some other reasons, must maintain a sleeping-car service—even at a loss. There is little or no loss to the Pullman Company—you may be sure of that! ”

“ The 'inherent advantage' of rail carriers shown here is superiority of service. The joint rail-barge rates do not fail to reflect this 'inherent advantage' for the same reason that a man who wishes to ride quickly and comfortably buys a Pullman ticket on a fast train instead of a coach seat on a 'milk run' train. No one would contend that fixing a lower price on the 'milk run' train seat fails to preserve the superior accommodations offered by a Pullman space. Each mode of transportation satisfies the needs and wants of some customers. ”

“ Being anxious to make good wages, and being a good mechanic, I would use extra effort and still make $4.00 per day. The next one the foreman would allow me only $16.00 for. Yet, by extraordinary effort I could still make $4.00 daily. The next one the [Pg 202] foreman would allow me $12.00 for, and with my utmost endeavors I could make only $3.00 per day. As a good mechanic I would refuse to take any more at that price and the work would be given to an inferior workman who could make only $1.25 per day. This is the way the Pullman Company has worked its piece work system. ”