Railway sleeping car

“ Railroad men did not patent the air brake or devise the sleeping car. All this is natural, because in any profession where one attains excellence in a given method his mental vision may become contracted; he may reason in a circle.
Every once in a while we are appalled by a terrible collision in a terminal, the result perhaps of some poor devil of an employe not appreciating fully the meaning of "all trains." To the innocent bystander the switch engine and cars are just as much a train as the Pullman flyer with its two little green markers on the last car. ”

“ I have heard many complaints made of the impossibility of sleeping in a railway car, and have wondered much how those who made them would have fared if compelled to spend, not one night, but twelve or fourteen in succession, in crossing the roadless plains and hills of Central Asia in a Russian cart, whose whole progress is a series of jolts that might dislocate the spine of a megatherium, flinging one at every turn against the corner of a box, or the broad shoulders of the Tartar driver. ”

“ In the winter season the east-bound passengers arrived at Chambersburg late at night by stage-coach, and as they were exhausted by a fatiguing trip over the mountains and many wished to continue their journey to Harrisburg to catch the morning train for Philadelphia, it became very desirable to furnish sleeping accommodations aboard the cars. The officers of this road fitted up a passenger car with a number of berths, and put it into service as a sleeping-car in the winter of 1836–37. It was exceedingly crude and primitive in construction. ”

“ The people who do not know the different kinds of cars are beyond the reach of instruction through such information. You have heard of the man who entered the dining car by mistake and asked, "Is this the smoking car?" Whereupon a waiter grinned and replied, "No, suh, this is the chewin' cah." The Pullman people years ago discontinued the use of the words "sleeping car" on their equipment. It is not of record that the voices of the car inspectors and the switchmen on the outside have awakened any more passengers than usual on account of such omission. ”

“ On several of the continental lines the Mann Boudoir sleeping-car has been introduced; it is the enterprise of an American, and is a very serviceable vehicle, though less comfortable than the famous Pullman. The Mann car is the ordinary European railway carriage equipped with sleeping accommodations, lavatories and the like; the traveler must have a first-class ticket to be admitted, and he pays in addition about $2.50 per night. ”

“ Pullman, like every other man, had his difficulties and disappointments, and did not hit the mark every time. No one does. Indeed, I do not know any one but himself who could have surmounted the difficulties surrounding the business of running sleeping-cars in a satisfactory manner and still retained some rights which the railway companies were bound to respect. Railway companies should, of course, operate their own sleeping-cars. ”

“ Why cannot the railway authorities separate the part of the car devoted to the gentlemen from that part inhabited by the ladies? The way in which the sexes are mixed up at night is, to say the least, unpleasant. I shall never forget my last experience in a Pullman sleeping-car. ”

“ It is even safer than gas, and is the most adaptable of any known method of lighting. Some sleeping-cars that have been recently put in service on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway are provided with small electric lamps in the sides of the car, between each two adjoining seats, so that the occupants can read comfortably either when sitting in their seats or lying in their berths.
It is not to be supposed that so large a subject as that of safety appliances can be exhaustively treated within the limits of one article. ”

“ Here are built all the finest sleeping cars and many of the finest special cars and railway cars seen on the railroads of this country. In addition there is also a very large amount of repairing done. ”

“ In 1898 the company owned 2,428 cars, which were operated on 121,236 miles of railway, ran 190,562,758 miles, and carried 4,852,400 passengers. Most of the cars are in the United States, but some are in Europe and Australia. The Wagner Palace Car Co. owns 560 sleeping cars and 143 parlor cars. In Europe most of the long distance sleeping and dining car service is operated by the International Sleeping Car Co., which runs cars between Paris and Constantinople (72 hours) , Paris and St. ”

“ It was the first sleeping-car ever seen in the North West, and for a time it was very popular; that is on the eastward bound trip. You see, miners that had made their pile at the mines always took the sleeper when they started for the east, and sometimes we'd have every berth in the car engaged. They were that anxious to spend their money that they would have taken any sort of a car that we might have put on the line and charged an extra price for. ”

“ But when the railroad began to stretch itself and to be a thing of reaches, it was found advisable to run trains at night in order to make quick communication between distant points. Travelling at night in the crude coaches of the early railroads was an abominable thing, and before the forties the old Cumberland Valley Railroad was operating some crude sort of sleeping-cars. Within another decade there was much experimenting of this sort. Old-timers on the Erie still remember the sleeping-cars that were built on that road soon after the close of the Civil War. ”

“ The sleeper on the 3.35 a.m. elevated train from the Harlem bridge was awake for once. The sleeper is the last car in the train, and has its own set that snores nightly in the same seats, grunts with the fixed inhospitality of the commuter at the intrusion of a stranger, and is on terms with Conrad, the German conductor, who knows each one of his passengers and wakes him up at his station. The sleeper is unique. It is run for the benefit of those who ride in it, not for the company's. It not only puts them off properly; it waits for them, if they are not there. ”

“ Surely there's nothing to equal motoring as a means of seeing the country. Not only are the constant change of landscape and constant succession of new scenes which the railway traveler may enjoy, to be had in an automobile but more—very much more.
The motorist gains a great deal that the railroad passenger inevitably misses. For the man on the train the musical clang of the dinner bell as one passes near some farmhouse, for instance, is lost—swallowed up in the noise and rush of the locomotive. ”

“ Into these berths the passengers soon withdraw themselves, and all goes quietly till morning-unless, indeed, some stray turning bridge has been left turned over one of the numerous creeks that underlie the track, or the loud whistle of "brakes down" is the short prelude to one of the many disasters of American railroad travel. There are many varieties of the sleeping-car, but the principle and mode of procedure are identical in each. ”

“ Again, on the railroads, many journeys have to be made at night; and it is seldom that one can secure a sleeping-coach. On much-travelled lines these are usually bespoken a week in advance. Failing to get the wagon-lit, as the sleeping-car is called, after the French fashion, one may sometimes engage a berlina, which is simply the coupé or end compartment of a car. This, being made to seat three persons instead of six, is allowed to be reserved. It costs about two dollars for a distance of one hundred miles. ”

“ If provision be not made for quickly carrying away the rain-water, and if it be allowed to collect under and around the sleepers, the action of the passing trains will work the finer particles of the packing into the consistency of soft mud, which will be gradually squeezed away, leaving the sleepers imperfectly supported and insecure. A loose sleeper involves a depression in the rails, and a corresponding lurch in the vehicles of the train, and a series of these depressions may produce such an oscillation in the train as to cause it to leave the rails. ”

“ Night trains never have been run on the line, but this innovation may be made. Practical railroad men say that there is no more danger in the night than in the day, for in the daytime, with so many abrupt curves and tunnels, it never is possible to see very far ahead, and the locomotive headlight might really be an advantage. The chief trouble of the railway management is in preventing landslides, but the greatest damage has been wrought by cloudbursts. ”

“ Finding it impossible to sleep, I lay there wondering a number of things: why, for instance, the Pullman sleeping-car blankets were unlike other blankets; why they were like squares cut out of cold buckwheat cakes, and why they clung to you when you turned over, and lay heavy on you without warmth; why the curtains before you could not have been made opaque, without being so thick and suffocating; why it would not be as well to sit up all night half asleep in an ordinary passenger-car as to lie awake all night in a Pullman. ”

“ But then the conductor locks you in when the train starts; there is no water to drink in the car; there is no heating apparatus for night travel; if a drunken rowdy should get in, you could not remove a matter of twenty seats from him or enter another car; but above all, if you are worn out and must sleep, you must sit up and do it in naps, with cramped legs and in a torturing misery that leaves you withered and lifeless the next day—for behold they have not that culmination of all charity and human kindness, a sleeping car, in all France. ”

“ Unfortunately, it is not every railway company which has them, and it is by no means every train on which they are run.
The drawing-room car, when you get it, is in itself a comfortable thing to travel in. There is a good deal of room in it. There is satisfactory lavatory accommodation. The attendants are civil and competent. Any one who can sleep in a train at all could sleep in a drawing-room car if only he were not waked up every time the train stops or starts. Trains must stop occasionally, of course. But there is no real need for emphasizing the stops as American trains do. ”

“ Where flange rails are used, they are fastened to the sleepers either by bolts, clamps, or clips raised up out of the iron sleeper, and bent over to hold tightening keys. Rolled transverse sleepers can readily be bent, or set in the centre to give the proper cant at the rail-seat; and in some types the sleepers are pressed in the machines, so as to be narrower towards the centre, and with a deeper turnover, to obtain increased stiffness. ”

“ The trains generally exceed ours in rapidity, but are very much behind them in comfort and elegance. There is no drinking-water in the English or Irish carriages. There are no stoves to keep one warm in cold weather or during the chilly hours of the night. If the weather is cold, tin foot-warmers, filled with water which is not always warm, are furnished in the proportion of one to two first-class passengers. There is no luxurious sleeping-car, where you can sleep comfortably, awake refreshed, find your boots ready blacked when you get up, and wash yourself at a marble wash-stand. ”

“ It is well to be honest, even to our own adulation, and one must confess that the sleeping-car of the European continent is but the nervous and hysterical daughter of the American mother of sleeping-cars. Many express trains are run without any sleeper, and the charges for berths are ludicrously extravagant—five dollars apiece for a single night. ”

“ Those who could sit up in the ordinary cars were conveyed in them. Those who could not sit up, or would be injured by so doing, were carried to the railway, by hand, on the mattresses or stretchers they had occupied in the hospitals to which they had first been taken. At the station the mattresses were placed on thick layers of straw or hay strewn over the floors of the freight cars in which supplies had been brought to the front. Large window spaces were cut in the sides or ends of the cars to provide for ventilation. ”

“ Iron “pot” sleepers have therefore been generally adopted, and they have been found very serviceable, especially on lines where the speed is not high. Some of the engineers are in their favour, even where trains are run at high velocities. Thus the District Engineer and the Locomotive Superintendent of the Punjaub Railway report strongly in recommendation of them. “I have never,” says the latter, “travelled over a finer piece of road, than the seventy to eighty miles of pot sleepers road laid between Montgomery and Mooltan. ”

“ But no one feels or shows so much arrogance as the sleeping car porters. They cannot pronounce "supercilious," but they can be it. Their disdain for the entire crew of any train that carries merely day-coaches or half-baked chair-cars, is expressed as only a darkey in a uniform can express disdain for poor white trash.
Of all the haughty porters that ever curled a lip, the haughtiest by far was the dusky attendant in the San Francisco sleeper on the Trans-American Limited. ”

“ As iron administered to the human system through the respiratory organs in the form of tenpenny nails mixed with other undesirable matter is not especially recommended by medical practitioners, the sanitary surroundings of the primitive railway car cannot be commended. There were no double tracks, and no telegraph to facilitate the safe despatching of trains. The springs of the car were hard, the jolting intolerable, the windows rattled like those of the modern omnibus, and conversation was a luxury that could be indulged in only by those of recognized superiority in lung power. ”