Pullman

“ It is natural to think of the Pullman Company as housed in some miraculous manner in the cars which it operates, as a company which expends its restless existence in untiring travel from state to state. ”

“ Their drives behind Uncle Neal’s old gray mare had always been the other way. Five miles more, and they were strangers in a strange land. Fifteen miles, and they were experiencing the bitterness of “exiles from home” whom “splendor dazzles in vain.” There was no charm left in the luxurious Pullman with its gorgeous red plush seats and shining mirrors. All the people they could see over the backs of those seats or reflected in those mirrors were strangers. ”

“ The second bird of passage proved to be a locomotive drawing a single car—a Pullman.
As the Pullman jolted across the frogs, however, the brakeman, interposing himself between it and the tender, released the coupling.
By the time that the Pullman had come to a full stop on the siding the locomotive was swinging westward like a scared jackrabbit. Then three men appeared on the Pullman's platform and shook impotent fists in the direction taken by the fugitive engine. ”

“ When No. 32 hove in sight—the Fast Mail is its proper name—and stopped opposite the small station at Adrian, a blessed, beloved, be-capped, be-buttoned and be-overcoated Pullman porter—an attentive, considerate, alert porter—emerged from it and at a sign from me picked up my overcoat and grip—they now weighed a ton apiece—and with a wave of his hand conducted me into a well-swept, well-ordered Pullman. ”

“ Thus in the space of a few years George M. Pullman not only evolved a type of railroad car luxurious and beautiful in design and embracing in its construction patents of great originality and ingenuity, but, in addition, evolved the rudimentary conception of a system by which passengers might be carried to any destination in cars of uniform construction, equipped for day or night travel, and served and protected by trained employees whose sole function is to provide for the passengers' safety, comfort, and convenience. ”

“ Pullman service has revolutionized the method of travel. Night has been abolished, the sense of distance has been annihilated; fatigue has been reduced to a minimum. In the oldest districts of the east, along the valleys of western rivers, on the wide-spread plains, among the remote peaks of the Rockies, in the deserts of the great southwest, the Pullman car, served by the same trained employees, furnishes the same comforts, and gives the same nights' repose. ”

“ These long transcontinental trains with two engines, one at the front and one at the rear, with their different grades of the Pullman, the tourist, and the emigrant car service, are as distinctive a feature of the twentieth century as the "prairie schooners" were of the early half of the nineteenth century. The real journey begins, of course, at Chicago, and as these trains leave in the evening the traveller fares forth in the seclusion of his berth in the Pullman. The nights on a sleeping-car may be a very trance of ecstasy to one who loves to watch the panorama of the skies. ”

“ A Pullman lower or a third story front in a three-dollar-a-day hotel was often his bed, and a marble-top table with iron legs screwed to the floor of a railroad restaurant and within sound of a big-voiced gateman bawling out the trains, generally his board. ”

“ The car in itself was in no way remarkable. A twelve-section and drawing-room, mahogany-finish, wide-vestibule sleeper, done in cream brown, hangings shading into Indian reds—a type of the Pullman car so popular some years ago for transcontinental travel; neither too heavy for the mountains nor too light for the pace across the plains. ”

“ Trained as a race by years of personal service in various capacities, and by nature adapted faithfully to perform their duties under circumstances which necessitate unfailing good nature, solicitude, and faithfulness, the Pullman porters occupy a unique place in the great fields of employment. ”

“ When I called for my ticket every Pullman was filled to capacity. Certainly, thought I, I am not going to be cheated out of a night's rest merely because the Pullman cars are all filled to capacity. So I clamored loudly for a Pullman. I was not alone in my demand, for a pompous salesman, who had purchased his ticket after I had procured mine, added his voice to mine. At length another Pullman was added. ”

“ And it may be said for the Pullman car that there, at least, the tip comes to a single servitor—the black autocrat who smiles genially no matter how suspiciously he may, at heart, view the quarter you have placed within his palm.
A quarter seems to be the standard Pullman tip—for one person, each night he may be on the car. Some men give more; some men—alas for poor George!—less. A quarter is not only average but fairly standard. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It would be difficult to make a landsman take in the scope of the change implied, but let him in imagination start across the continent in an old-fashioned, cramped-up stage- coach, full of passengers, with such coarse fare as could be picked up from day to day, and return in a Pullman car with well-stocked larder and restaurant attached, and he will get a glimmering as to the difference between steerage and wardroom life on board a man-of-war. ”

“ I also find as I emerge from the narrow passageway, which is an unavoidable nuisance in all Pullman cars, the genial, good-natured, and good-looking sleeping-car conductor, Miles H. Suter, who has charge of the three Pullman sleepers that are on the train.
“Mr. Suter,” I said, “the Pullman people have given us a fine train.”
“Yes,” he replied. “There are no more substantial or more comfortable cars in the Pullman service than these. In one of them a person can ride many hundreds of miles and not become fatigued. You will find the motion of these cars very agreeable and easy. ”

“ The Pullman's are most comfortable, and for a long journey like ours nothing could be so good; but I am glad that in England we don't have either these or the ordinary American car in general use. The publicity is so odious, and one does get bored by the passengers constantly wandering up and down the train, and the boys who pass and repass every ten minutes selling books, newspapers, cigars, candy, and the unripest of fruit, which they are always pressing you to buy; to say nothing of chewing, spitting Americans one has to countenance all day long. ”

“ The Pioneer, viewed in the eyes of 1864, was really a luxurious car. It was as wide as the sleeping car of to-day and nearly as high; in fact, so high and so wide was it that there were no railroads on which it might run, and when Pullman pleaded with the old-time railroad officers to widen the clearances, so as to permit the Pioneer to run over their lines, they laughed at him.
"It is ridiculous, Mr. Pullman," they told him smilingly in refusal. "People are never going to pay their good money to ride in any such fancy contraption as that car of yours." ”

“ Pullman, realizing the handicap of existing conditions to the full enjoyment of the various types of cars which he had established, set himself to the solving of the problem by devising a perfect system for constructing continuous trains and at the same time providing sufficient flexibility in the connecting passage ways to allow for the motion of the train, particularly when rounding curves. ”

“ The Pullman car has fortunately come to make railway travelling in
America endurable. Apart from other considerations, the inevitable stove
is better managed. You are thoroughly warmed,---occasionally, it is
true, parboiled. But there is at least freedom from the sulphurous
atmosphere which pervades the ordinary car, with its two infernal
machines, one at either end. In addition, the Pullman cars have more
luxurious fittings, and are hung on smoother springs. ”

“ Then came the time when the inadequacy of such complete but disconnected service struck the imagination of a man who saw the endless miles of track of countless railroads bound together by a supplemental system to which all railroads contributed and from which they profited, and by which, most of all, the public would enjoy a service of a scope which could otherwise only be attained by an actual combination of these railroads into a single company. But the vision of the founder of the Pullman Company did not stop at the idea of a unified system. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Pullman has been the recipient of many a blessing from the weary traveler, and the idea, whatever it was, that led him to invent the sleeping car that has proved such a comfort to the traveler of today, deserves to go down in history as the greatest idea that ever came from the place where ideas come from. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ In a corner of the great yards at a track end stands a little yellow car, smaller than many of our interurban trolley cars, the paint peeling from the boards that have seen the changing seasons of half a century. It is old number "9," not the earliest, but one of the early Pullmans. Perhaps there are nights, when the roar of the machines is stilled, that the ghosts of a long-past day once again walk up and down the narrow aisles, strangers to the age of steel.
The car ready for the interior fittings. The floor is of monolith construction
Interior work. ”

“ Women, officers, and men fling off the life-belts they have worn and crowd to the gangways. With shameless eagerness they push their way ashore. The voyage is over.
Along the pier long trains are drawn up waiting for us. We crowd into them; lucky men, or foreseeing men with seats engaged beforehand, fill the Pullman cars of the train which starts first. It runs through the sweet familiar English country incredibly swiftly and smoothly. Luncheon is served to us. On this train, at least, there still are restaurant cars. ”

“ If we cannot remember these, then let us remember those for whom Pullmans are not good enough and who spurn the dust of our summer ways in their automobiles, and leave the parlor-cars to our lower-class vulgarity. Such people take their automobiles to Europe with them, and would not use that possible Pullman train if they found it waiting for them at the port of arrival in Germany. ”

“ The Pullman tourist sleeping car, which you can find on all through trains of the different railroads throughout the United States, are to the traveler of moderate means what the Pullman car is to the millionaire traveler. They are designed for the comfort and convenience of the traveling public to whom the expenditure of a dollar more or less is a matter of moment, and who cannot afford or do not care for the small extra show and tinsel of the Pullman sleeping car, but whose only desire is to make their journey pleasant, comfortable and safe. ”

“ The former gentleman is likely to live long after his death in the title of his cars. One takes a Pullman (of course, only a share of a Pullman) as one takes a Hansom. Pullman and sleeping-car have become synonymous terms likely to last the wear of time. Travelling from sunrise to sunset through a country which offers but few changes to the eye, and at a rate which in the remoter districts seldom exceeds twenty miles an hour, is doubtless a very tiresome occupation; still it has much to relieve the tedium of what under the English system of railroad travel would be almost insupportable. ”

“ The Pullman porter of today must be a very versatile sort of a person, he must have plenty of patience, be a good judge of human nature, quick, kind and observant. Many are the times a gouty and crusty passenger has traveled in my car, who was in such a bad humor that it was next to impossible to please him, yet before he had ridden a hundred miles with me, I had him in good humor and laughing with the rest of the passengers. "Laugh and the whole world laughs with you." ”

“ The whole car—a Pullman—is luxuriously fitted up, and one end is partitioned into a storeroom and kitchen; there is a smoking-room for lovers of the weed, and a separate toilet room for ladies. As the porter of the car blackens the boots, and there is a telegraph office at each stopping place, the waggish question of "Where is the barber shop?" is often made. ”