W. H. DAVIES,
The Autobiography
of a Super-Tramp (1908)
Private varnish
For approximately five decades, or roughly the period between 1890 and the second world war, no status symbol in the lexicon of wealth glittered more refulgently than the private railroad car. No property was more explicit evidence of having arrived both socially and financially, since its occupancy breathed of privilege and aloofness and its resources of luxury were almost limitless. When all else had been achieved—a château on Fifth Avenue, English butlers, fleets of Rolls-Royce town cars, powdered footmen, a box in the Diamond Horseshoe, gold plate at table and old masters on the walls, there remained a crowning cachet of elegance, the capstone of material success. It was a sleek, dark-green private hotel car outshopped to one’s own specification by Pullman and attached to the rear of the great name trains of the period when its owner wished to travel. It was absolute tops.
The first private cars were built for railroaders of presidential rank and their immediate subordinates, general managers, division superintendents and operating vice-presidents, but by the late eighties their vogue had spread to men of means who were merely directors or large stockholders in railroads, and soon they were a necessary property for men of exalted financial status who had no railroad connections at all.
Men of means everywhere began commissioning splendid hotel cars from Pullman or one of the several competing car-builders in existence until Pullman achieved an absolute monopoly in the field in the late nineties. In California, Darius Ogden Mills, silver-whiskered old moneybags of the Mother Lode and Montgomery Street, ordered the first private car in the region from Harlan & Hollingsworth of Wilmington, Delaware. The tab was a modest $25,000. A few years later, in the Middle West, Adolphus Busch commissioned the first Adolphus from Pullman with chilled beer piped under pressure into its every apartment and stateroom. Silver senator William Sharon of Nevada owned a beauty; so did copper senator William Andrews Clark of Montana. For $50,000 Pullman in the late eighties outshopped Katharyne to the order of coal baron R. C. Kerens. E. H. Talbot, editor of Railway Age, had Pullman build him Railway Age, and mining millionaire James Ben Ali Haggin of San Francisco and Kentucky became owner of Salvator, which had a gold dinner service and a chef ravished from Foyot’s in Paris. Newspaper publisher John McLean of Cincinnati came by the car Ohio, and Harry Oliver, pioneer ironmaster in the Mesabi region, rode comfortably in Tyrone, named by the sentimental Irishman for the county of his birth in the old country. Charles M. Schwab was at various times owner of two Lorettos, the second even more magnificent than the first.
For five full decades the order books at Pullman and to an only slightly lesser degree at American Car & Foundry were a roster of the great names and powerful personalities of American industry, society, and politics.
Interior of Pullman smoking car, c. 1900,
Southern Pacific Railroad
The cost of private cars rose with the passing years. In the early seventies $25,000 was considered ample and all California was gratified, vicariously, when Mrs. Leland Stanford paid that amount for Stanford as a birthday present for her husband. By the turn of the century the going price had about doubled, although Charles M. Schwab paid a reported $100,000 for the first Loretto, the most elaborate and ornate ever seen at that time. By 1915, the general run of private cars from Pullman was $75,000 and in the late twenties Joseph Widener, William R. Reynolds, and Thomas Fortune Ryan were signing checks for $300,000. Perhaps the top price of the era, which incidentally was the final flowering of the private railway car, was $350,000, reportedly paid by Mrs. James P. Donahue to American Car & Foundry for Japauldon, named for her late husband.
For these substantial sums private car owners could point to a considerable variety of conveniences and luxurious appointments, all of them contained of necessity within the clearances and dimensions decreed by the specifications of the Association of American Railroads. Beyond these basic functional properties, the imagination and financial resources of the owner took over. English butlers and French chefs were often supplemented by valets and personal maids and secretaries. The mother-of-pearl call buttons in Mrs. Schwab’s stateroom on Loretto II suggested the availability of seven servants. Gold dinner services were often indicated, and as mentioned elsewhere, Mrs. E. T. Stotesbury pointed to her gold-plated plumbing fixtures as a genuine economy: “Save so much polishing, you know.” The first air conditioning on any railroad car was an innovation on Major Max Fleischmann’s Edgewood. Jewel safes, wine bins, and other capacious repositories for food and valuables came in all dimensions. Aboard Lalee, Lily Langtry was happy to announce there was a food locker capable of holding an entire stag. Adelina Patti aboard her appropriately named Adelina Patti had a sunken marble bathtub which, when the car was finally dismantled, turned out to be painted metal. Fritzi Scheff, another thrush, had a bathtub neither sunken nor allegedly marble, but the water splashed so that she could only take a bath when her train paused for twenty minutes or more. Sometimes this was at three in the morning, an incovenient hour.
Jay Gould had ulcers of the stomach and when he traveled on Atalanta with a private physician in attendance and a chef specially trained in the preparation of the ladyfingers which were one of his staples of diet, the Gould cow whose butterfat content was just suited to the financier’s requirements rode in a private baggage car up ahead. When J. P. Morgan, who never owned a car of his own, voyaged afar, he rented as many private cars as his party might need and had a baggage car fitted with racks for carrying his own stock of champagnes, Rhine wines, and Madeiras. When the Goulds traveled as a family there might be as many as four Gould cars with a special engine traveling as an extra; Jay aboard Atalanta, Helen Gould on her own car, Stranrear, George Gould on his Dixie, and guests and miscellaneous retainers on still another Gould car, Convoy.
When Cissy Patterson, publisher of the Washington Times-Herald, had Ranger in commission, her butler carried with him seven complete and different sets of slip covers for every piece of furniture in the car. Mrs. Patterson liked variety and they were changed every day in the week. She was also devoted to flowers, and florists along the right-of-way were alerted in advance by telegraph and had wagonloads of fresh blooms at strategic stopping places. The flower bill on occasion came to $300 a week.
The private car on the Great Northern Railroad of Louis Hill, son of the Empire Builder and an ardent motorist in the early days of gasoline, contained a garage at one end available by a ramp, and sleeping space for a chauffeur and a mechanic. The staff on August Belmont’s Mineola was uniformed by Wetzel, at the time the most expensive men’s tailor in the United States, and a number of private cars including George M. Pullman’s own Monitor and Arthur E. Stillwell’s No. 100 on the Kansas City, Pittsburgh & Gulf, boasted parlor organs for music either sacred or profane.
The Stillwell car later came into the possession of Bet-a-Million Gates, and it was aboard this car and as a result of a wager on a raindrop’s progress down a window pane with James R. Keene that, according to one school of thought, he derived his nickname.
Henry Ford distrusted the safety of Pullman Standard construction and Fair Lane was so heavily trussed and reinforced with steel that it had to be routed to avoid all but the most massive trestles on carrier railroads.
Perhaps the most sybaritic devising of all was designed and built by Pullman as part of the architectural economy of Errant, the 100-ton car of Charlie Clark, son of Senator William A. Clark. At the touch of a lever a partition beside the master stateroom’s double bed dissolved to reveal it in convenient juxtaposition with the equally capacious bed in the adjacent guest stateroom.
LUCIUS BEEBE,
The Big Spenders
Railway Interiors. Railway conductor going the round of the cars at night.
THIS TRAIN
This train is bound for glory, this train,
This train is bound for glory, this train,
This tra
in is bound for glory,
If you ride in it, you must be holy, this train.
This train don’ pull no extras, this train,
Don’ pull nothin’ but de Midnight Special.
This train don’ pull no sleepers, this train,
Don’ pull nothin’ but the righteous people, this train.
This train don’ pull no jokers, this train,
Neither don’ pull no cigar smokers, this train.
This train is bound for glory, this train.
If you ride in it, you mus’ be holy, this train.
ANON
The making of the President, 1968
1. Bobby Kennedy returns to Washington
We crowd-counted, as political people always do, as the cortège wound away from the Cathedral through New York City. So many of us who followed could not quickly adjust from the manners of last week’s political cavalcades to the procession of death. And the crowd was better than good—at least half a million; all of them, somberly, with him. It was only, however, when the funeral train that was to bear him to Washington emerged from the tunnel under the Hudson that one could grasp what kind of man he was and what he meant to Americans. Kenneth O’Donnell said, as he glanced from the windows of the train, “Now you can see what the Hell it was all about—he could really turn them on.”
For 225 miles from the Hudson to Washington, he had turned them on. There were the family groups: husband holding sobbing wife, arm about her shoulders, trying to comfort her. Five nuns in a yellow pick-up truck, tiptoeing high to see. A very fat father with three fat boys, he with his hand over his heart, each of the boys giving a different variant of the Boy Scout or school salute. And the people: the men from the great factories that line the tracks, standing at ease as they were taught as infantrymen, their arms folded over chests. Women on the back porches of the slum neighborhoods that line the tracks, in their housedresses, with ever-present rollers in their hair, crying. People in buildings, leaning from office windows, on the flat roofs of industrial plants, on the bluffs of the rivers, on the embankments of the railway cuts, a crust on every ridge and height. Pleasure boats in the rivers lined up in flotillas; automobiles parked on all the viaducts that crossed the line of the train. Brass bands—police bands, school bands, Catholic bands. Flags: individual flags dropped in salute by middle-aged men as the train passed, flags at half-staff from every public building on the way, entire classes of schoolchildren holding the little eight-by-ten flags, in that peppermint-striped flutter that marks every campaign trip. He turned them on, black and white, rich and poor. And they cried.
There, as one passed through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware, to Washington, was the panorama of American industrial might. There were the famous brand names of all America’s skills from steel and chemicals to pickles and mustards. There were the old red-brick factories of the last century and the new industrial architecture of glistening turquoise, orange, blue, red-tiled electronic plants, their workers no longer uniformed in blue overalls but in sterile white smocks. There, for example, was the Ford plant, and a delivery yard of almost a quarter of a mile of gleaming new Mustangs, shining on racks in their glossy colors, promising pleasure for the pleasure society; and the medicinal plants, with all their secret wonders, too. It was a nation of unlimited skills and crafts but plagued by the madness of violence.
It should have been a four-hour trip by train; accidents, crowds, and fatalities in the crowds delayed the trip, stretching it to eight and a half hours. Thus, slowly, almost grotesquely, then with relief and acceptance, the atmosphere in the funeral train changed. It could not have changed without the bravery and grace of behavior of Ethel Kennedy, her black veil turned back, proceeding through the cars of the cortège to speak friendship and comfort to his grieving friends. One finally understood aboard the train the purpose of an Irish wake: to make a man come alive again in the affection and memory of his friends. The memory of Robert Kennedy came back and the range of his friendships slowly transformed the mood from stark tragedy to an abashed yet real joy in this companionship brought together by one man’s personality.
2. Nixon at Deshler
The campaign moved smoothly, as always. The techniques of the advance men improved—from airport greetings at arrival, to the multiplicity of balloons, to internal communications, to the phalanxes of pretty Nixon girls with their slim legs and blond hair who were seated in rectangles, front-center, before the cameras to screen the few hecklers from national view. It was all smooth, pre-programmed, efficient. And yet, occasionally there would still come a day to remind that a Presidential contest remained a personal matter between a leader and his people.
Such a day was the one that closed at dusk in Deshler, Ohio, in late October. We had been traveling all day by train north from Cincinnati, through industrial Ohio toward Toledo. Whistle-stop campaigning in America has been obsolete since Harry Truman’s campaign of 1948, but candidates still toss a salute to the past by a railway excursion now and then; and the rail journey through Ohio is classic. I had accompanied Nixon in 1960 over exactly the same route, and was following him now both for comparison with the past and to see what effect the Key Biscayne strategy might have on his behavior.
The trip was obviously planned for TV coverage; by now the TV cameras had become tired of Mr. Nixon’s normal procedure and required new happenings to enliven the audiences (“One thing we decided in Key Biscayne,” said William Safire, “is that the campaign needed some excitement”). The trip would also, in accord with the Key Biscayne plan, step up the stress on the theme of law-and-order.
Yet there was more to it than that. All day we drummed along the railway tracks fringed by paradox. The factories spewed smoke, their parking lots were crowded, trucks carrying away cargo and product in unending stream. But wherever the train pulled to a halt in the old downtown centers, one could observe the boarding up of the railway stations, the decay of the central business districts which had grown up on the rails because they were arteries of life. The old downtown centers of community were husks that had been gutted by change. The people who gathered at the rallies were prosperous, well-dressed, sober, in robust health. But they were afraid, and whenever Nixon spoke of crime, they cheered (“When Richard Nixon got finished,” wrote Jimmy Breslin, “there was a strangler’s hand coming out of every cornfield in Ohio”). All day we journeyed through peaceful countryside spotted with the sycamores, wild oaks and hardwoods of the great valley. But all day the view from Mr. Nixon’s rear observation car as it rattled north could be seen only through the silhouette of the three Secret Service agents standing shoulder to shoulder on the observation platform, searching the receding tracks and the beautiful land for snipers who might kill.
We came to Deshler, Ohio, a town of about 2,000, after dark, and Mr. Nixon emerged on the platform in a tan topcoat, shivering in the chill. Deshler is famous for its feed grains, its tomato-production and its seed corn. A huge grain elevator to which farmers bring shelled corn is its outstanding monument, and along the tracks, nubbles of red-gold-yellow-white kernels lay thick as pebbles, where trucks had spilled them; an Ohio reporter told me that the best pheasant-shooting in the neighborhood lay along the tracks because the pheasants grew fat here on spilled kernels. Deshler much more than Los Angeles, Key Biscayne or Manhattan is Nixon’s spiritual country, and so in this, his eighth speech of the day (with two more to come), he could talk plain language. He did his crime passage, the media theme for the day (“I was looking at some figures that my staff had prepared for me on the forty-five-minute train ride from Lima up here to [Deshler].... In forty-five minutes, just forty-five minutes... here is what happened in America. There was one murder, there were two rapes, there were forty-one forcible crimes...”, etc). Then, in a brief burst at the close, he tried to sum up his campaign: “I want you to remember, my friends, that at the moment when you vote, you are going to determine your future, your peace, peace at home, you are going to determine whether or n
ot you are going to have real income or imaginary income. You are going to determine whether America again is respected in the world or whether it’s not. You are going to determine whether America is to go forward with new leadership or whether we are going to be satisfied with leadership that has failed us, that has struck out on every count.”
THEODORE WHITE,
The Making of the President
1968
Mr. and Mrs. Pitman
When it was time to leave for Washington, it was snowing hard, and the airport had closed down. So I took the train. Penn Station was rebuilding, and the redcap who took my bags along with those of a lady from Buffalo said that we would have quite a walk. We had a half-mile marathon; up ramps, down ramps, into elevators, out of elevators, round pillars (sometimes into pillars), through tunnels, out of tunnels, all over. Sometimes the redcap told us to go one way while he went another; he said we would meet up, and we did, though how we did was a mystery. When we reached the train, the lady from Buffalo asked how much she should give the redcap. My feeling, in view of all the exercise we’d had, was that he ought to give us something; but I said, how about a dollar? The redcap said, “Five pieces at a quarter a piece is one dollar and twenty-five cents. Thank you, ma’am.” I had three cases and gave him a dollar; he didn’t give me any change.
A Book of Railway Journeys Page 13
