Strange as it may seem, the private car mania, in chronic form, seems to attack some railroad presidents most violently. For reasons which show that railroading is a business filled with fine tact and diplomacy, these cars are called business cars. It is also remarkable that for size and elegance they vary in almost inverse ratio to the size and importance of the railroad that owns them. Big railroads, like the Pennsylvania, the Harriman lines, and the New York Central rather pride themselves upon the simplicity of their official cars. Some of these are plain almost to the point of shabbiness. Contrasted with these are the private cars belonging to the head of a great interurban electric line in Southern California, a car so wondrously beautiful that it was carried all the way to Washington, in the Spring of 1905, so that a thousand foreign railroad managers there gathered in convention, might see the attainments of American car-builders. Another Western railroad, a small steam line this time, boasts a president’s car with a dining service that cost $2,500. A little Mississippi lumbering road spent $40,000 in providing a private car for its operating head.
The big Eastern roads know about all of these cars. Their heads get frequent invitations to take a run over the K., Y. & Z., or some other enterprising jerkwater road that runs from the back waters to the bad lands. Of course, they never take the trip, but they invariably see the next step in the developments. It comes in the form of requests for a “pass for haul of car and party” from Chicago to New York and return. Time was when the New York Central and the Pennsylvania were laid low under the avalanche of requests of this sort. Some of their slower trains were laden down with long strings of these deadhead caravans, and on one memorable occasion a whole section was made up of the prominent private cars of decidedly unprominent railroad officers.
Since the introduction of the eighteen-hour trains between these two most important cities of the country this burden has been lessened. These fastest trains will absolutely not haul any private cars at any price; it is a rule that would not be abrogated for the President of the United States. So the railroaders of the West, from the big men like Stubbs and Kruttschnitt of the Union Pacific down to the small fry, leave their cars in the roomy terminal yards at Chicago and come to New York most of the time on one or the other of the eighteen-hour trains. About the only time their cars come East nowadays is when they are bringing their families to the seashore for the Summer.
So much for the private cars. They are perhaps one of the most typical things of the America of to-day, as we have seen. Actresses and millionaires use them for their private comfort and convenience; tourist parties roam forth in them; delegations proceed in them to conventions; civic bodies find them agreeable aids to junketing. Sometimes a party of sportsmen will charter a car and hie themselves off to a secluded spot where the railroad roams through the forest, find an idle siding and use their car for a camp for a week, a fortnight, or even a month. Cities and States use private cars as travelling museums to exploit their charms, some of them are travelling chapels for religious propagandism. The uses of the private car are nearly as manifold as those of the railroad itself.
In the beginning things were different. Our great grand-daddies drew no class lines when they travelled, but were content to find shelter from the storm, or upon pleasant days from the showers of sparks scattered by the locomotive. 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. There were six of them, more like summer cottages than cars, for the Erie was then of 6-foot gauge, and its cars were 12 feet wide. The berths were made up in crude form by hanging curtains from iron rods and bringing the bedding from a storage closet at the end of the car. There was a little less privacy in them than in the modern Pullman, but in the eyes of Jim Fisk, whose love of elegant luxury was first responsible for their construction, they were nothing less than palaces. One of them was named after Fisk and carried his portrait in an immense decorative medallion on each of its sides. The other cars were the Jay Gould—without decorative medallions—the Morning Star, the Evening Star, the Queen City, and the Crescent City. All you have to do to-day, to set an old Erie man’s tongue wagging, is to speak of one of these cars. They were triumphs, and away back in that day and generation they cost $60,000 each.
But while many men were fussing in futile ways to build comfortable cars for long journeys, a man named George M. Pullman, over in Western New York, was packing his goods and making ready to go to Chicago and build his world-famed car-works there. Pullman’s cars survived the others. He bought in the Woodruff Company and some lesser concerns, and for many years his only important rival was the Wagner Palace Car Company, a Vanderbilt property. In course of time this too was absorbed, and the Pullman Company had virtual control of the luxurious part of American traffic, few railroads caring to run their own parlor and sleeping-car service.
There are economic and sensible reasons for this in many cases. Some railroads have great through passenger traffic, demanding Pullman equipment in summer and little or none in winter. Others reverse this need and so whole trains of sleeping and parlor cars go flocking north and south and then north again with the private cars. Special occasions, like great conventions, call for extra Pullmans by hundreds; and because of the enormous capital that must be tied up, a single supplying company is best able to handle the problem. Still, big roads like the New Haven, the Milwaukee, and the Great Northern have been most successful in building and operating their own sleeping and parlor-car service. A great road like the Pennsylvania might do the same thing, and because of that possibility the Pennsylvania was one of the first roads in the country to make the Pullman Company pay it for the privilege of hauling its cars. As a rule, the railroad pays the Pullman Company for hauling by the mile—a very few cents a mile—and the Pullman Company also takes the entire receipts to itself.
The body of Abraham Lincoln was carried to its final resting-place in the first real Pullman car that was ever built. President Lincoln rode in one of Pullman’s earliest attempts at railroad luxury, some sleeping-cars that he had remodelled from day coaches on the Chicago & Alton Railroad and that were put in service between Chicago and St. Louis in 1860. These cars were almost as crude as the barbaric predecessors that had induced Pullman to tackle the problem of railroad comfort approaching the standards of boat comfort.