The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  7

  GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME

  With the rapid expansion of the railroads all across the United States, travelers benefited from a great improvement in the passenger service. Not only were there more trains, operating regularly to published timetables, but they were also becoming more comfortable for passengers. During the 1870s, many railroads began to offer more amenities and luxuries to the traveling public, although provision of these facilities remained patchy. Probably the most important improvement, at least to those who could afford it, was the Pullman sleeping car, which was essential for comfortable travel in such a vast country where journeys of three or four days were commonplace.

  In the early days of the railroad, as we have seen, trains stopped for the night and, indeed, for meals, but this was impractical and unsatisfactory. A different arrangement was clearly needed, and it was not long in coming. Although indelibly associated with the name of George Pullman, the sleeping car was not his invention. Indeed, a primitive version of the sleeping car had been introduced on the Cumberland Valley Railroad, in Pennsylvania, as far back as 1839,1 consisting of a pair of carriages each with four sets of three-tiered berths—no more than hard boards with no bedding or mattresses—that allowed passengers to lie down parallel to the tracks and were folded away during the day. A few years later, the New York & Erie Railroad provided two cars equipped with iron rods that could be used to link facing seats to create a crude and uncomfortable bed. However, as the cushions were made of horsehair cloth that penetrated all but the thickest clothing and were often liberally infested with a variety of ravenous insects, getting to sleep in conditions described as “cramped, crude and uncomfortable” must have been solely the province of the inebriated. Furthermore, the poor condition of the track made it seem “like sleeping on a runaway horse,” according to one early traveler.2 The railroad did not provide pillows or bedding, and passengers went to bed wearing their boots and breeches. By the 1850s, several American railroads were advertising sleeping-car accommodation that represented a slight improvement on what had gone before. The first real innovator was Webster Wagner, who is credited with the invention of the sleeping car, though he was merely building on the work of others. Wagner was a stationmaster on the New York Central, which had just come under the control of Cornelius Vanderbilt (about whom we will hear much more in the next chapter). Wagner had previously been a wagon maker and developed the idea of a car with a single tier of berths and bedding closets at each end, a definite improvement on all predecessors. Vanderbilt embraced the idea and provided the money to build four such cars. They immediately proved popular, demonstrating the viability of the concept, and soon different versions of sleeping cars appeared on several of the longer-distance railroads. It was, however, George Pullman—whose name would become synonymous with his product—who developed the concept and revolutionized overnight travel on the American railroads.

  Like many of the early railroad entrepreneurs, Pullman had previously been successful in another field. Born in upstate New York, he had entered the contracting business with his father, who made a fortune from moving houses—the whole house, that is, not its contents—which happened to be in the way of the expansion of the Erie Canal. The apogee of Pullman’s house-moving career came in 1861 with the raising of the four-story Tremont House Hotel, Chicago’s tallest building at the time. The hotel owners had thought the building would have to be demolished when the local authorities decided that Chicago’s streets needed to be raised to clear the local swamps. Pullman, however, had other ideas. He placed the whole building on five thousand jacks and, with the help of twelve hundred workers, who repeatedly turned the screws 180 degrees on Pullman’s signal, slowly raised the hotel by a total of six feet, while not interrupting the lunch service or the chambermaids making the beds in the rooms above.

  Many more such moving jobs ensued, and creating a mobile hotel on rails, therefore, could be seen as a logical next step for Pullman. He first converted two carriages on the Chicago & Alton Railroad in 1858 to provide upper and lower sleeping berths. The innovative idea was that the upper berth was suspended from the ceiling by ropes and pulleys and when not in use could be pulled up snug with the roof. Curtains were used in front and between the berths, but the crudeness of the accommodation could be judged by the fact that lighting was still by candles and heating provided by a woodstove, which—given the presence of the flapping curtains—posed an awful fire risk. At least blankets and pillows were provided, but not sheets, and it still proved difficult, according to the conductor on the first service, to persuade passengers to remove their boots, possibly because they may have been the most valuable thing they owned. This was not a trivial issue. For many years, every Pullman car had notices stating, “Please take off your boots before retiring,” which was also printed on all Pullman tickets. Although the scheme was moderately successful, and a third car soon introduced, Pullman went to seek his fortune elsewhere, running a store in Colorado during a mining boom for four years until returning to Chicago in 1863. He had, however, kept on teasing away at the sleeping-car idea by sketching designs. On his return, he improved the concept by fitting a hinged upper berth that, when folded away, could also be used as a headrest for the seating accommodation during the day.

  Now, with the enhanced design, there was nothing to stop Pullman. Legend has it that the catalyst for his success was to provide the funeral train for Abraham Lincoln after the president was assassinated in 1865. By then Pullman had been working on his superior sleeping car for almost a year. The idea was to bring luxury to the train traveler, and Pullman, together with a boyhood friend, Ben Field, designed a new type of coach, developed from scratch rather than by adapting existing stock. Appropriately named The Pioneer, with eight sections and a washroom and two compartments at each end, it was first put into service on the Chicago & Alton in 1865. However, Pullman had a problem. To accommodate all the facilities, Pullman’s coach exceeded what is called the “loading gauge” of the railroad—that is, the size of the envelope created by tunnels, bridges, and platforms that can accommodate the locomotive and coaches. Pullman’s coach was longer—which meant it could not handle sharp curves—and wider than conventional stock. Mrs. Lincoln is said to have seen the coach on a visit to Illinois shortly before her husband’s death and been enchanted by its style and elegance. Consequently, when his funeral cortege was being organized, she insisted that The Pioneer be used, and the Chicago & Alton had to go to the enormous expense of rapidly adjusting its tracks to accommodate the width of Pullman’s coaches. The Chicago & Alton soon ordered more coaches, and other railroads followed suit, despite the cost of the requisite track work.

  It was here that Pullman’s business acumen came to the fore. Rather than merely produce coaches for these railroads, Pullman retained control over them. Pullman cars were hooked to existing train services, sometimes in tandem with the railroad companies’ existing sleeper cars. Although Pullman charged a premium of 50 cents per night, his coaches proved so popular that they soon displaced their rivals. Pullman’s key selling point was the luxurious nature of his cars. The Pioneer had cost twenty thousand dollars to produce, but subsequent models were even more expensive, stretching to twenty-four thousand dollars, sums that can be put in perspective by the fact that no previous coach had cost more than five thousand.

  Pullman’s version of the sleeping car, which became the American standard and survived well into the second half of the twentieth century, as demonstrated by the train scenes in Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy film Some Like It Hot, remained very different from the European style, where single compartments, with up to six beds, were the norm. Instead, Pullman’s design was open plan, with makeshift folding seats, pull-down berths, and only curtains for privacy, but with nothing to stop a bullhorn snorer from keeping the whole car awake. Women, indeed, got rather a bad deal from the arrangements. The editor of the British Baedeker’s guide book strongly approved of the open-plan design of normal p
assenger cars, but was appalled at the design of Pullman’s sleeper cars. In particular, he complained about the fact that men were allocated twice the space of women in these open-plan cars, despite the fairer sex’s having more elaborate dressing requirements. The company argued that there were far more men to accommodate in these unsegregated cars and that separate restrooms were provided. But the Baedeker’s scribe was not appeased: “It is not considered tolerable that they [women] should lie with the legs of a strange, disrobing man dangling within a foot of their noses,” he snorted. However, another British visitor, an anonymous “London parson,” could hardly contain his excitement about the prospect of sharing sleeping accommodation with thirty-odd people of both sexes, especially as he was allocated the lower bunk below “a young married couple sleeping in the berth above mine. The lady turned in first, and presently her gown was hung out over the rail to which her bed curtains were fastened. But further processes of unrobing were indicated by the agitation of the drapery which concealed her nest . . . “3 One can almost feel the clergyman’s palpitations . . .

  In fact, Pullman cars continued to provide twice as much room for men to smoke, dress, and perform their toilette than they did for women, but thanks to another innovation by the company, the intercar vestibule, the ladies could enjoy wandering about the train from coach to coach. Previously, getting between cars had been a hazardous process, exposing passengers to the open air between the platforms at the ends of each coach, and women were loath to take the risk. Now, however, the connections between cars were protected with pleated leather coverings. According to Pullman’s publicity for the introduction of this facility on the Penn sylvania Limited in 1887, “Ladies may now make social calls or wander at will, may even take long walks for exercise or to relieve monotony, so perfect are the arrangements and appliances.”4

  It was not just the coaches that were luxurious. Pullman set a standard for service that increased his renown and did so by retaining control over every aspect of his business, which was entirely integrated. He did everything from manufacturing the cars—which eventually took place in a company town covering a massive thirty-six hundred acres at Lake Calumet on the outskirts of Chicago—to ensuring that all the right linen was available. Pullman was, in modern parlance, a control freak, as indeed were most of the early railroad pioneers who were, in essence, establishing capitalist disciplines for the first time over an industry spanning huge distances. His eponymous town, America’s first planned industrial estate, which was built in the 1880s, was run as his personal fiefdom, with strict rules governing the behavior of the residents. In return for the high-quality accommodation, literally a stone’s throw from the factories, the workers were banned from reading newspapers other than the company’s ever-cheery Pullman News and were expected to keep their houses in good order or face eviction. Goods had to be bought from the company store, simply because there was no alternative, and the rent was not cheap. (This would eventually provoke the bitter and cruel Pullman strike, described in the next chapter.) Much of the town survives as pleasant housing today, even though the factories are now mere burned-out shells. The imposing fifty-room Florence Hotel, built to accommodate the various suppliers’ representatives—of iron, steel, upholstery, and other commodities—who visited the town in its heyday, became a rooming house in the 1930s, but is now being renovated as a museum.

  Whereas the factory workers were white, the train service staff were black, with the exception of the Pullman conductor,5 an arrangement that replicated the overseer-and-slave relationship of the prewar plantations. Pullman’s motives in employing solely black train staff were anything but altruistic. The growth of Pullman’s empire, which built up quickly to nearly fifty cars by 1867, coincided with a vast pool of former slave labor coming on the market. At first he offered African American attendants no wages, forcing them to live off tips. Conditions were tough, with the attendants not being allowed to sleep on duty, as they were required to be on call twenty-four hours a day. Inevitably, they sometimes dozed off, risking being disciplined by inspectors, or “spotters,” as they were called. Pullman liked the idea of having black people serve his white clientele, who were either used to being looked after by African Americans or flattered by the attention if they were not. Pullman said blacks were “by nature adapted faithfully to perform their duties under circumstances which necessitate unfailing good nature, solicitude, and faithfulness.” The attendant’s job was arduous and was “a cross between a concierge, bellhop, valet, housekeeper, mechanic, babysitter [passengers were encouraged to leave their children in his care] and security guard . . . prepared at any moment day or night to be a good listener, answer questions, find lost articles [and not steal them, since leaving valuables around was another ploy used by the “spotters”] and handle emergencies.”6

  The attendants were invariably known as George, a kind of demeaning joke and probably shorthand for “George Pullman’s boy.” The name was, according to Kornweibel, “particularly galling to porters.”7 Although transgressions resulted in firings, the porters became experts at passive resistance in response to the worst experiences of rudeness from their white clients. When a passenger called out “George!” some porters would simply respond, “George not on t’ train today.” The rudeness toward the attendants outlived Pullman. Traveling in a Pullman coach shortly after the Second World War, the Duke of Windsor had been measly in his tips, giving just a few cents to a porter who carried out numerous special chores and then, remarkably, asked for his eighty cents back. This proved, in fact, to be the duke’s idea of a joke, and he promptly rewarded the attendant with fifty dollars, but it was the initial humiliation that stuck longest in the man’s memory. A more common trick was to tear a ten-dollar bill in two and give half to the attendant, with the implied promise to give the other in return for good service. Despite these indignities, in many respects being a Pullman attendant was an excellent job at the time, as it offered rare stability and a steady income—Pullman did soon start paying a basic wage—that could be supplemented by occasionally generous tips. Indeed, the jobs were much sought after and invariably were either passed on from father to son or obtained through the recommendation of a friend or relative.

  For all their sometimes shabby treatment by the company and some of the passengers, the attendants and the waiters provided a service that was second to none. They followed rules set out in a primer by Pullman himself that detailed, for example, twelve steps on how to serve a beer, beginning with “1) Ascertain from passenger what kind of beer is required” through to “12) Remove bar tray with equipment not needed by passenger and return to buffet.” Each car was equipped with one hundred sheets and pillowcases, forty blankets—employees were only allowed to use specially provided blue ones and could be fired for using the emblematic brown linen reserved for passengers—and towels of various kinds. All bedding was removed and cleaned nightly. For his part, Pullman made a fortune, eventually breaking or taking over all his competitors to create a virtual monopoly. One of the last rivals to go was poor Wagner, with whom Pullman had a series of legal spats and who eventually perished in a rear-end accident in one of his own cars in 1882. Pullman expanded rapidly in the 1870s and 1880s, both by creating new business and by taking over competitors. Soon he was producing special cars for the megarich of the day, coaches that cost upwards of a half-million dollars, some twenty times more than his already expensive standard models, and which, for a modest fee, would be attached to the back of normal service trains without, of course, a connecting vestibule. These were the “mansions on wheels” that are celebrated in coffee-table art books and represented the apogee of train travel. One was laid out at such expense that, according to a guest, “the only thing that’s economical about our car is the solid gold plumbing. It saves polishing, you know.”8

  Geoffrey Freeman Allen, a chronicler of luxury trains, reports that “the most splendid of them ran to marble baths, hidden safes, Venetian mirrors, an open fireplace burning balsa
m logs [this was John Pierpont Morgan’s] and even an English butler to supervise the car’s private cellar and the Lucullan output of its kitchen.”9 J. P. Morgan’s efforts, though, were bested by the train built for railroad baron Jay Gould (of whom we will hear much more in the next chapter), which consisted of four coaches, one of which housed a special cow to produce fresh milk with just the right proportion of butterfat to meet the needs of the ailing magnate’s digestive system. A doctor, too, was permanently on board. But neither the proximity of the cow nor Gould’s precarious health prevented every evening from being an occasion, with guests expected to don full evening dress and the whole train teeming with footmen, butlers, and ladies’ maids, all in appropriate uniform.