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.
But the fact remains that the average citizen, when he is felled by an intermittent attack of the private-car mania, is content to hire one of the very comfortable equipages that the Pullman Company keeps ready at big terminals at various points across the country. The arrangements for these are exclusive of the price paid to the railroad companies for their haul.
A complete private car, equipped with staterooms, baths, private dining-room, observation parlor and the like, costs seventy-five dollars a day. For two or more days this rate drops to fifty dollars a day. An extra charge is made for food; but the railroad will deliver the car without charge at the point from which you wish to begin your journey.
[Illustration: CONNECTING DRAWING ROOM AND STATE ROOM]
[Illustration: "A MAN MAY HAVE AS FINE A BED IN A SLEEPING CAR AS IN THE BEST HOTEL IN ALL THE LAND"]
[Illustration: "YOU MAY HAVE THE MANICURE UPON THE MODERN TRAIN"]
[Illustration: "THE DINING-CAR IS A SOCIABLE SORT OF PLACE"]
For the haul of these cars the railroads will charge you according to their regularly filed tariffs, unless you have that valued connection with some common carrier. This varies from a minimum of from eighteen to twenty-five first-class fares. In other words, let us assume that the minimum in a particular case is twenty fares. That particular railroad will carry up to twenty persons in the car at its regular fares; if there are more than twenty aboard it will get a full fare ticket from each over the minimum allowance. That is all a matter established as the special train rates are established, not by whim, but by law.
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.
Leonard Seibert, a veteran employee of the Chicago & Alton, told a few years ago of Mr. Pullman's first attempts to remodel the old coaches of that road into sleeping-cars. Said he:
"In 1858 Mr. Pullman came to Bloomington and engaged me to do the work of remodelling the Chicago & Alton coaches into the first Pullman sleeping-cars. The contract was that Mr. Pullman should make all necessary changes inside of the cars. After looking over the entire passenger car equipment of the road, which at that time constituted about a dozen cars, we selected Coaches Nos. 9 and 19. They were 44 feet long, had flat roofs like box cars, single sash windows, of which there were fourteen on a side, the glass in each sash being only a little over one foot square. The roof was only a trifle over six feet from the floor of the car. Into this car we got ten sleeping-car sections, besides a linen locker and two washrooms--one at each end.
"The wood used in the interior finish was cherry. Mr. Pullman was anxious to get hickory, to stand the hard usage which it was supposed the cars would receive. I worked part of the Summer of 1858, employing an assistant or two, and the cars went into service in the Fall of 1858. There were no blue prints or plans made for the remodelling of these first two sleeping-cars, and Mr. Pullman and I worked out the details and measurements as we came to them. The two cars cost Mr. Pullman not more than $2,000, or $1,000 each. They were upholstered in plush, lighted by oil lamps, heated with box stoves, and mounted on four-wheel trucks with iron wheels. The berth rate was fifty cents a night. There was no porter in those days; the brakeman made up the beds."
Pullman built his first real sleeping-car in 1864. It was called the _Pioneer_ and he further designated it by the letter "A," not dreaming that there would ever be enough Pullman cars to exhaust the letters of the alphabet. The _Pioneer_ was built in a Chicago & Alton car shop, and it cost the almost fabulous, in those times, sum of $18,000. That was extravagant car-building in a year when the best of railroad coaches could be built at a cost not exceeding $4,500 each. But the _Pioneer_ was blazing a new path in luxury. From without, it was radiant in paints and varnishes, in gay stripings and letterings; it was a giant compared with its fellows, for it was a foot wider and two and a half feet higher than any car ever built before. It had the hinged berths that are to-day the distinctive feature of the American sleeping car, and the porter and the passengers no longer had to drag the bedding from closets at the far end of the car.
The _Pioneer_ was not only wider and higher than other passenger cars, it was also wider and higher than the clearances of station platforms and overhead bridges. But when the country was reduced to the deepest distress because of the death of President Lincoln, the fame of Pullman's _Pioneer_ was already widespread, and it was suggested that the fine new car should be the funeral coach of the martyred president. This involved cutting wider clearances all the way from Washington by the way of Philadelphia, New York, and Albany to Springfield, Ill.; and gangs of men worked night and day making the needed changes. Pullman knew that the increased convenience of an attractive car built upon proper proportions would justify these changes in the long run, and it is significant that the height and width of the Pullman cars to-day are those of the _Pioneer_; the changes have been made in the length. Not long after that car had carried President Lincoln to his grave, General Grant started on a trip west, and the Michigan Central Railroad anxious to carry him over its lines from Detroit to Chicago, widened its clearances for the same celebrated car. After that there were several paths open for the big car, and work was begun upon its fellows. It went into regular service on the Chicago & Alton Railroad; and the Pullman Palace Car Company was formed in 1867. The alphabet soon ran out, and the company to-day operates between four and five thousand cars in regular service. There is a popular tradition, several times denied, to the effect that Pullman for many years gave his daughters $100 each for the names of the cars, and that that formed the source of their pin money.
[Illustration: AN INTERIOR VIEW OF ONE OF THE EARLIEST PULLMAN SLEEPING-CARS]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A STANDARD SLEEPING-CAR OF TO-DAY]
While the dimensions of the car were largely set, improvements in its construction have gone steadily forward, as has been told in an earlier chapter. The interior of these luxurious modern cars has not been neglected. From the beginning they have been elaborate in rare woods and splendid textile fittings. The advancing era of American good taste has done much toward softening the over-elaboration of car interiors--the sort of sleeping car that George Ade used to call "the chambermaid's dream of heaven." The newest cars present the quiet elegance and good taste of a modern residence. Nothing that may be added in wealth of material or of comfort is omitted, but the foolish draperies and carvings that once made the American car the laughing-stock of Europeans have already gone their way.
To make for luxury all manner of devices have been added to these cars.
The superintendent sometimes hears complaints from a traveller that the sharp curves on some mountain division have spilled the water on his bath-tub; and the switching-crews at the big terminals know that turntables are kept busy turning the big observation platform cars so that they will "set right," and the big piazza-like platform will rest squarely at the rear of the train. For those persons who wish to pay for the luxury there are staterooms, and the best of these staterooms have the baths and big comfortable brass beds. After many years of unsatisfactory experiment the electric light has come into its own upon the railroad train; and even upon unpretentious trains the night traveller no longer has to wrestle with the difficulties of dressing or undressing in an absolutely dark berth.
Once the problem of housing folk at night had been met and solved, another rose. If travellers might sleep upon a train, why might they not eat there, too? The American eating-houses had met with a degree of fame.
There are old fellows who will still tell you of the glories of the dining-rooms at Springfield, at Poughkeepsie, at Hornellsville, and at Altoona. But the eating-house scheme had its great disadvantages. For one thing, it caused a delay in the progress of through fast trains to halt them three times a day while the passengers piled out of the cars and went across to some lunch-counter or dining-room to ruin their digestions in the twenty minutes allotted for each meal. For another thing, the process of clambering in and out of the comfortable train in all sorts of weather was unpopular. The well-established and equally well-famed eating-houses along the trunk-line railroads were doomed from the time that the Pioneer won its first success.
No more should a train tie up at meal-time than a steamboat should tie up at her wharf for a similar purpose. The first dining-cars were called hotel-cars; and the first of these, the _President_, was placed in operation by the Pullman company on the Great Western Railway--now the Grand Trunk--of Canada, in 1867. The hotel-car was nothing more or less than a sleeping-car with a kitchen built in at one end and facilities for serving meals at tables placed at the berths. It was well enough in its way, but travellers demanded something better, something more hygienic than eating meals in a sleeping place.
Pullman went hard at his problem, and in another year he had evolved the first real dining-car, the _Delmonico_, which went into regular service on the Chicago & Alton Railway. The _Delmonico_ was a pretty complete sort of a restaurant on wheels, and not far different from the dining-car of to-day.
To-day there are 750 successors to the old _Delmonico_ in daily service on the railroads of the United States. A small regiment of men earn their livelihood upon them; some genius, handy with a lead pencil, has estimated that these serve some 60,000 meals--breakfast, lunch, and dinner--every day. The amount of food and drink consumed is a matter that is left to the statistician.
The average full-sized dining-car seats 40 persons, but that does not represent the business it does. Unless the car can be completely filled two or more times at each meal, it is not considered a profitable run. The European method of reserving seats at "first table" or "second table" has never obtained in the United States, and the wise man on a popular train sacrifices his dignity and hurries toward the dining-car at the first intimation that the meal is ready.
To take care of the hungry folk a dining-car crew of nine men is kept busy. The car is in absolute charge of a conductor or steward, who is held sharply accountable by the dining-car superintendent of the road for the conduct of his men and of his car. He signs a receipt for the car equipment before starting on his run out over the line, and he must see to it that none of that equipment, not a single napkin or spoon out of all his stock, is missing at its end. He is held in as strict account for the appearance and behavior of his men. The waiters must be neatly dressed, must have clean linen; the conductor himself must be something of a Beau Brummel, carrying a certain polite smile toward each one of the road's patrons, no matter how disagreeable or cranky he or she may be. For all of these things and many others--maintaining a sharp guard over the car's miniature wine-cellars, adding "specials" to the bill-of-fare for a given day, acting as a cashier for the service--he receives a princely salary, varying from $75 to $110 a month.
His crew, as far as the passengers see it, consists of five men, almost always negroes. Back in the tiny kitchen is the chef, with two assistants, preparing the food. The kitchen is tiny. It is less than five feet wide and fifteen feet long, and the three men who work within it must have a place for everything in it, including themselves. Obviously there is no room for the waiters, and these receive their supplies through a small wicket window.
If the kitchen is tiny, it is also marvellously complete. An ice-box fits upon and takes half the space of the wide vestibule platform; the range has the compact dimensions of a yacht's range; sinks, pots, and kettles fit into inconceivably small spaces. Yet in these tiny cubbyholes one hundred, ofttimes many more dinners, of seven or eight courses each, are carefully prepared, with a skill in the cooking that is a marvel to restaurateurs.
The _table d'hote_ dinner--the famous "dollar dinner"--of the American railroad has almost disappeared. The constant increase in foodstuffs is most largely responsible for this. The Pullman Company long ago gave up this particular feature of passenger luxury, save in a few isolated cases.
It had ceased to be a particularly profitable business, this serving of fine meals for a dollar each; and so the railroads themselves took it up and prepared to make it a cost business for the advertising value to them.
Each railroad plumed itself upon its dining-car service--some of them still do--and each was willing to lose a little money, perhaps, to induce travel to come its way because of the superior meals it served upon its trains. But as the price of food-stuffs continued steadily to rise, the advertising feature of these meals began to be more and more expensive, and the dollar dinner quickly disappeared. A high priced _a-la-carte_ service took its place, and the railroads sought to establish their commissary upon a money-making basis.
The attempt has not been very successful. For the lifting of the dining-car prices and the attempt to reduce running expenses has, on some roads in particular, hurt the reputation of these "restaurants on wheels," and so in due season hurt their patronage; brought their patrons from folk who went out of their way to eat on dining-cars to folk who eat there only because of dire necessity. And these last still have found prices high and the result is to be eventually a return to former methods in part--slower trains stopping again for meals at important stations, the faster trains returning to the _table d'hote_. Beginnings have been made along that line recently. The dollar dinner may never return to some roads--although it remains a joy and a delight to travellers upon the New Haven system--but the "regular dinner" at least, capable of quick service in a crowded car, bids fair to have a renaissance.
While the problem of dining-car economy, and profit even, remains a problem, the idea is nevertheless being steadily extended all the while to branches and to trains that could not support full-sized dining-cars. To meet these needs smaller cars--generally called _cafe_-cars--in which the dining-compartment is much reduced in size, have been built and operated.
In these two cooks, two waiters and a steward form the working force and the fixed charges of the outfit are correspondingly reduced. They are further reduced in the operation of the so-called broiler-coach, which is nothing more or less than a day-car with a kitchen built in, the entire service being performed by one or two cooks and a like number of waiters.
Some sleeping-cars and some parlor cars still have kitchens where a single accomplished negro may act as both cook and waiter, and these cars are designated commonly as buffet sleepers or buffet parlor cars.
The dining-car department of the railroad will probably have more to do than supervise the operation of these various sorts of equipment.
Restaurants and lunch-rooms at terminals and stations along the line may fall under its direct supervision, and it will probably also conduct the cuisine of the private cars of the railroad's officers.
The dining-car department has direct charge of all the men employed on cars and in the lunch-rooms; it sees to it that the railroad's culinary equipment is fully maintained; it buys food and drink, linen, silver, china, kitchen supplies of every sort. The routing of the cars is carefully planned to secure the most economical use of them. Few trains running from New York to Chicago will carry a single diner throughout the entire trip. These trains will use two, sometimes three cars during a single-way trip between the cities. A single car will generally make the daylight run with the train, to be dropped at night to continue its course west again at daylight upon some other train needing meal service. The first train will pick up a fresh diner in the morning to carry into Chicago. In this way, a diner may take a week or more to make the round trip from New York to Chicago. Obviously, her commissary must meet all needs along the way. Staple supplies, liquors, dry groceries are all placed aboard the car at the terminals. Fresh meats and vegetables are picked up along the route. This town has an especial reputation for its chickens; this for its grapes; this other for its celery. The dining-car department knows all these, and it selects under the rare opportunity of a housewife who has a market nearly a thousand miles long within which to do her marketing.