A run in a private car is the acme of luxury to the average man. These are used for a variety of purposes in these comfort-loving days, and the sight of one or more of them attached to the rear of a heavy train has ceased to excite comment. The average luxury-loving millionaire has one—possibly two—of these expensive toys attached to an entourage that embraces ocean-going yachts, complete stables, and dozens of motor-cars of every description. If he can claim some sort of responsible connection with a large railroad system, he is likely to have his car hauled free from one ocean to the other; and the millionaire likes these little perquisites. He is not so far removed, after all, from the man who huddles in the corner of the smoking-car and secretly hopes and prays that the conductor will forget to collect his ticket.
To appreciate the number and variety of these cars take a look at the passenger sidings at any of the large Florida beach hotels in midwinter. Better still, run down to Princeton or up to New Haven at any large football game. You will see parked there at such a time from sixty to one hundred of these palatial cars, some of them private property, others chartered for the occasion.
Even in the middle of the night this branch of luxurious railroad traffic is still at your disposal. An emergency call summons you out of town for a distance, and the night train schedules do not meet your needs. The night train-master will meet your needs. He will act as the agent of the railroad and arrange, while you hold the telephone receiver in your fingers, the entire schedule for you. Trains will be held, connections made; the telegraph is capable of arranging the details. If you demand speed, the railroad will give it to you—if you are willing to pay the price and give a release against damage to your precious bones. Increased speed means increased risk to your railroader.
Maude Adams uses a special many Saturday nights to carry her down to her Long Island farm at Ronkonkoma. Her place is far out of the regular suburban district, and there are no regular trains that will enable her to reach it after the evening performance. For ordinary service she is quite content with a private car—the mania has its deathly grip on a good many of our prosperous theatrical folk.
Lillian Russell used to live down in the Rockaway section of Long Island, hardly outside of the New York City limits. When she played in the metropolis a special train carried her six nights in the week out to her suburban home. There were plenty of regular trains—theatre trains, in the colloquialism of the railroaders—but the prima donna would have none of them. She had acquired the private-car mania while she was on the road. So her special stood night after night in the big railroad terminal in Long Island City—a neat little acquisition for a prosperous lady. The nightly ride cost her fifty dollars to the railroad company; and the generous tips she lavished, from the engine-cab back, doubled that sum.
Hardly a prosperous star, these days, but demands in the contract a fully-equipped car for the long, hard days on the road. The car has some value for advertising; its greatest value, however, lies in the maximum degree of comfort that it affords, as compared with the constant changing from one country hotel to another. Sometimes the biggest of these folk let the mania seize so tightly upon them that they go to excess.
Paderewski, on his first trip to America, made a flying journey up to Poughkeepsie to bewilder the fair Vassarites. He shuddered at the thought of what he was pleased to call the provinces. He had the popular European notion of American small towns and their hostelries. Poughkeepsie has very comfortable hotels, but Paderewski would not risk them. He would not sleep in them, neither would he eat in them. A private car solved the first of these problems; the second was met by bringing two cooks and a waiter up from the New York hotel in which he was staying. He was paid $1,000 for the concert, and his travelling expenses cost him more than half that sum, which was a pretty good ratio.
Still, stage folk are not in the habit of counting either ratios or their pennies, and the average prima donna would make some sacrifices at the savings-bank in order to indulge herself in this extravagant and purely American mania. The grand-opera folk indulge themselves to the limit, invariably at the expense of the beneficent impresario. But even this long-suffering publicist does not feel the expense so bitterly. Special trains for opera companies make splendid advertising, but they do not cost one cent more than regular transportation. For the railroads, acting under the guidance of an all-wise and all-powerful commission down at Washington, will issue, without extra cost, from sixty to one hundred tickets for the man who orders a special train at two dollars a mile. In this way the wise theatrical manager keeps his little flock segregated while en route, and reaps gratuitously the prestige and the advertising that ensue.
Even the cheaper companies have their own cars—gaudy affairs most of them, their battered sides still reflecting the brilliancy of some gifted sign-painter. You must remember seeing them in the long ago, back there at the home-town, stuck in the long siding next the coal-shed, and surrounded by admiring youth, getting its first faint taint of the mania. The All-Star Imperial Minstrel Troupes, and the Uncle Tom shows, are the graveyards of the private cars. Proud equipages that in their days have housed real magnates and have been the theatres of what we like mysteriously to call “big deals,” once supplanted, drop quickly down the scale of elegance. In their last days they come to the hard use of some itinerant band of entertainers, to squeak their rusty joints and worn frames as if in protest against a fly-by-night existence over jerkwater railroad branches.
Come back again to those cars you see at the college football games, the travelling private palaces that migrate up to Newport, the White Mountains, and the Adirondacks in summer; that flock south in the winter like the birds. The astonishing thing is that few of these cars are owned by the persons who are using them. Of course, as we have already said, if a man can lay claim to some railroad connection, he can get his car hauled free over other lines and, perhaps, get it built for him; but more of that in a moment. There are probably not more than 40 private cars in the land that are owned by persons not connected with the railroads. This is an astonishingly low figure, considering the number of these craft that are constantly drifting about our 200,000 miles of track. Some society folk have cars as a part of their daily life, but the storage costs are apt to cause a man to think twice before he buys one. Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Morgan have managed to worry along very comfortably without contracting the disease. As a rule, both of these men are willing to accept the comfort of any of the fast limited trains that form part of the luxurious equipment of the American railroad.