With the realization constantly before him that the most perfect service could be given only by the most radically improved equipment and the widest extension of this company's activities, Mr. Pullman identified the early years of organization with a development of the passenger car to a degree of comfort, convenience, safety, and luxury that passed popular comprehension. Nothing was too good for the Pullman car; too much money could not be invested in it. Hand in hand with this development of the mechanical side of service he developed its extension throughout the country, by means of which it might be put into the hands of the greatest number of people for their greater convenience. Never has history more completely justified a business that from its character must be to a certain extent a monopoly. Never has competition more promptly yielded to unification.
It is natural to think of the Pullman Company as housed in some miraculous manner in the cars which it operates, as a company which expends its restless existence in untiring travel from state to state. But, as a matter of fact, the vast organization which makes possible the movement of the seventy-five hundred cars which comprise the present equipment holds an interest secondary only to the actual operation of the cars themselves.
Front end of a dining room in a private car
Rear end of the same dining room
There was a day when the run from Albany to Schenectady was the longest continuous railroad ride that a traveler might take. Today it is possible to travel in a Pullman car without change from Washington, D. C., to San Francisco, a distance of 3,625 miles, requiring one hundred and eighteen hours, or approximately five days.
But distance is not alone characteristic of Pullman service; equal attention is given to shorter "hauls." From Greensboro to Raleigh, North Carolina, for instance, a distance of only eighty-one miles, Pullman sleeping cars are regularly operated. Here, as in many other instances, arrangements exist whereby the passengers may retire early in the evening while the car is at rest on a siding in the station, and arise at a reasonable hour in the morning. By such service hotel accommodations are practically afforded and it becomes possible for the travelers to have a whole day for pleasure or business at one place, spend a night in which a hundred or five hundred miles are traversed, and arrive without fatigue at another place the following morning.
The hotel desk corresponds to the ticket office of the Pullman Company. Imagine a hotel with 260,000 beds and 2,950 office desks, and a total registration of 26,000,000 people each year. This is what the Pullman Company does, however, and incidentally it does it often at a mile a minute and in every state in the Union. The 2,950 offices where Pullman berths, seats, drawing rooms or compartments may be purchased include Quebec, Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Vancouver on the north; San Diego, El Paso, New Orleans, Key West, and Havana on the south; San Francisco on the west, and the seaboard towns of Maine on the east. Under normal conditions the southern limit is still further extended to fifty-six additional offices in the Republic of Mexico, as far south as Salina Cruz on the Gulf of Tehuantepec, and approximately two hundred miles from the boundary between Mexico and Guatemala, Central America.
The longest distance which it is possible to travel with a single Pullman ticket is from Portland, Maine, to San Francisco, by the way of Washington, D. C., New Orleans and Los Angeles. This cannot be done, however, in one sleeper, and changes must be made at New York and Washington. But a brief consideration of the perfect organization necessary to provide such continuous passage with berths reserved at each point of change by the mere purchase of a ticket at the starting point, grants to the Pullman Company a measure of credit due. In actual mileage the distance covered by this trip is 4,199.