George Pullman - Development of Pullman Sleeping Car

Development of Pullman Sleeping Car

Between 1859 and 1863, Pullman spent time as a gold broker near Golden, Colorado, where he raised money. He met Hanniball Kimball, a future business associate.

He developed a railroad sleeping car, the Pullman sleeper or "palace car." These were designed after the packet boats that traveled the Erie Canal of his youth in Albion. The first one was finished in 1864.

After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, Pullman arranged to have his body carried from Washington, D.C. to Springfield on a sleeper, for which he gained national attention, as hundreds of thousands of people lined the route in homage. Orders for his new car began to pour in to his company. The sleeping cars proved successful although each cost more than five times the price of a regular railway car. They were marketed as "luxury for the middle class."

In 1867 Pullman introduced his first "hotel on wheels," the President, a sleeper with an attached kitchen and dining car. The food rivaled the best restaurants of the day and the service was impeccable. A year later in 1868, he launched the Delmonico, the world's first sleeping car devoted to fine cuisine. The Delmonico menu was prepared by chefs from New York's famed Delmonico's Restaurant.

Both the President and the Delmonico and subsequent Pullman sleeping cars offered first-rate service. The company hired African-American freedmen as Pullman porters. Many of the men had been former domestic slaves in the South. Their new roles required them to act as porters, waiters, valets, and entertainers, all rolled into one person. As they were paid relatively well and got to travel the country, the position became considered prestigious, and Pullman porters were respected in the black communities.

Pullman believed that if his sleeper cars were to be successful, he needed to provide a wide variety of services to travelers: collecting tickets, selling berths, dispatching wires, fetching sandwiches, mending torn trousers, converting day coaches into sleepers, etc. Pullman believed that former house slaves of the plantation South had the right combination of training to serve the businessmen who would patronize his "Palace Cars." Pullman became the biggest single employer of African Americans in post-Civil War America.

In 1869 Pullman bought out the Detroit Car and Manufacturing Company. He bought the patents and business of his eastern competitor, the Central Transportation Company in 1870. In the spring of 1871, Pullman, Andrew Carnegie, and others bailed out the financially troubled Union Pacific; they took positions on its board of directors. By 1875 the Pullman firm owned $100,000 worth of patents, had 700 cars in operation, and had several hundred thousand dollars in the bank.

In 1887, Pullman designed and established the system of “vestibuled trains,” which virtually made an entire train into a single car. The vestibules were first put in service on the Pennsylvania Railroad trunk lines.