he Americans have suppressed distances by bringing railway trains to perfection.
You take the cars after dinner to go a two or three hundred mile journey. You pass an hour or two in the smoking-room; you go to your berth, sleep the night through, and by the time you awake you are at your journey's end.
In point of comfort, the American trains are to the French and English trains what these latter are to the stage-coach of bygone days.
Nothing can surpass the comfort and luxury of the Pullman cars, unless it be the perfected Pullman that is called the Vestibule Train. Six or seven carriages, connecting one with another, allow of your moving about freely over a length of some hundred yards. Dining-room, sleeping car, drawing-room car, smoking-room, library, bath-room, lavatory, the whole fitted up in the most luxurious style. What can one desire more? It is a hotel on wheels. It is your appartement, in which you whirl from New York to Chicago in twenty-four hours. Cook, barber, valets de chambre—you have all at hand. Yes, a barber! There is a barber's shop at the end of the train. Perhaps, by-and-by, they will introduce a billiard-room. The platforms at the ends of the carriages are closed in by a concertina-pleated arrangement having doors opening outwards. You pass from one carriage to the other without having to expose yourself to cold or rain; children may play about and run from carriage to carriage with perfect safety. Everything has been thought out, everything has been carried out that could conduce to the comfort of travellers; and unless the Americans invent a style of dwelling that can be moved about from one place to another (and they will come to this, no doubt, in time), I do not see that one could desire, or even imagine, more agreeable, more elegant, or safer railway carriages.
Let anything unforeseen occur—a snowstorm, for instance,—delaying the train for hours, and you at once recognise the superiority of American trains over European ones. Instead of being cooped up in a narrow box-like compartment, shivering with cold and hunger until the rails have been cleared, you can move about from one end of the thoroughly warmed train to the other, and obtain food and drink when you require it. Under such circumstances it is not difficult to resign yourself to the delay.
Rugs are a useless encumbrance. The trains are warmed from October to April. As soon as you enter the carriages, you feel the need of taking off your wraps, for the temperature is generally hovering about the eighties.
The fireman is a pitiless ebon tyrant, who will take no heed to your appeals for mercy: let the temperature be high or low, he evidently considers his whole duty to be the piling on of as much coal as the stove will burn.
There are windows and ventilators: but if you open your widow, you will see your fellow-travellers turn up their coat-collars and get down their shawls and furs; and you will hear energetic grumblings, which will give you to understand that you are turning yourself into a public calamity. The Americans are shivery people, stewing themselves in a bain-marie.
As to the ventilators, they are under the management of the car conductor; and if that gentleman is not too warm, you may gasp and faint before getting any relief from him. The comfort of the travellers is not his affair; and if you succeed in coaxing him to open one or two ventilators, he soon comes along again to close them.[18]