When President Abraham Lincoln died on the 15th April 1865, a nation prepared to mourn. Shot in the head at Ford's Theatre nin Washington the night before, te dead Lincoln was to be borne away from Washington back to his birthplace, Springfield, lIIinois. Thousands watched in shocked silence as the funeral train departed from washington. It travelled at a dignified 32 kph (20 mph), a speed it would not exceed for the next 2,575km (1,600 miles). For George Pullman, the first national commemoration by the railways of a presidential death was both a personal tragedy and an unexpected business opportunity. Pullman, as a family friend of the Lincolns, provided the funeral car.

The event was to put his business into overdrive.

The 35 year old Chicago entrepreneur had only recently left the business of moving houses (literally raising them with a jack, a method of house moving invented by his father, lewis) to involve himself in railways. Pullman was said to have experienced a particularly uncomfortable night abord a sleeping car between Buffalo and Westfield. New York, the hell of a journey prompting the idea for a luxury car. He took his plans to the Chicago and Alton Railroad. Pullman proposed to strip out an old car, refit it and run it on one of the Chicago and Alton's regular routes. Exploiting the notion of providing a little extra comfort for a few extra dollars, Pullman would charge the Chicago and Alton passengers a small supplement.

The first cars went into service in september 1859 on the Chicago to St. Louis line and in the early 1860s Pullman launched the Pioneer. It was the most expensive car in America, but unfortunately too wide to ride on much of the Chicago and Alton railway. Then Lincoln was assassinated and the president's wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, accepted Pullman's offer to use the pioneer as the funeral car. The Chicago and Alton hastily altered the trackside to accommodate it and almost overnight Pullman became a brand name.(The relationship with the Lincolns went deep. Their only surviving son, RobertTodd Lincoln, went on to become president of the Pullman Company after George Pullman's death.)

The Pullman cars gained plenty of admirers. Mark Twain travelled in one from Omaha: 'After dinner we repaired to our drawing room car, and,as it was sabbath eve, intoned some of the grand old hymns-'Praise God from whom', etc,; 'Shining Shore', 'Coronation'.etc,- the voices of the men singers and of the women singers blending sweetly in the evening air, while our train, with its great, glaring Poly-phemus eye, lighting up long vistas of prairie, rushed into the night and the wild. Then to bed in luxurious couches, where we slept the sleep of the just.'(Roughing It, 1872)

An English journalist with Harmsworth Magazine was similarly impressed:'At night a porter appears to convert your two easy chairs into a berth; the sofa is in like manner transformed; the table is shut up somehow, and whisked away; shelves which you had not noticed before are brought into action so you undress and go to bed like good children, leaving orders as to what time you would like to be called.'

The orders weretaken by African Americans(Twain referred to 'ethiop waiters'), since Pullman made a point of employing former slaves. Although many African Americans were glad of the work, the policy infuriated social reformers who thought it underlined the servile role of freed slaves.

After forming his Pullman Palace Car Company, Pullman operated almost fifty sleeping cars across the united states and Canada.

He diversified into dining cars after an unsuccessful trial with a hotel car where everything from cooking, eating and sleeping took place in the same , somewhat claustrophobic carriage. The new dining cars operate as separate restaurants on wheels, joined to the passenger car by a corridor, a feature later adopted on passenger trains across the world. The first, the Delmonic, was named after a renowned New York restaurant. Mark Twain was again impressed. He reported in Roughing It how he and his companions onboard the train out of Omaha enjoyed 'a repast at which Delmonico himself could have had no occasion to blush...for in addition to all that ordinarily makes up a first-class chop dinner, had we not antelope steak....our delicious mountain brook trout, and choice fruits and berries,'Two days afterwards their Champagne glasses (were) filled to the brim (and) spilled not a drop.

The Pullman empire expanded until there were 7,000 cars running on over 150 railways. On the eve of making his first million dollars in 1868 Pullman is believed to have met up with a lovesick banker's son from Belgium. This was Georges Nagelmackers, who had been aboard to study the railways after being involved in an unfortunate love affair with a first cousin.Looking for a way to improve family relations, Nagelmackers took a long, cool look at the Pullman business and soon returned home to try to interest his family and friends in his Wagons-Lits company. Like Pullman, Nagelmackers planned to tack luxury carriages onto regular trains and skim off the premium ticket price that wealthy travellers were prepared to pay.

His initial plans for a route between Ostend and Berlin foundered bacause of the Franco-Prussian war and failed to attract more than a tepid response from his family. But by 1872 and with an injection of cash from the somewhat dubious Colonel William D'Alton Mann, {the American businessman and publisher was known to take bribes to keep people out of the news}, Nagelmackers launched his own versions of the Pullman.

He reasoned, rightly, that Europeans preferred their privacy and would be more interested in compartmentalised 'boudoir cars',this was certainly the case with one of Nagelmackers' patrons, the Belgian KingLeopold II. He was the worlds most travelled railway monarch and his rumoured affair with 22 year old Parisian ballet star Cleo de Merode ( she modelled for both the painters Henri de Toulouse-Lautree and Gustav Klimt) made Leopold particularly susceptible to the idea of a railway bedroom. Another client was the Peninsular and Oriental Stream Navigation Company, the P & O, which wascharged with ensuring that the Indian mail reached its destination as quickly as possible. Nagelmackers' introduction of Pullman like dining cars in 1881 meant that the Mail Train was no longer delayed by refreshment stops as it sped through Europe to the Mediterranean ports.

Wagon-Lits constructed special cars for trains that traveled by sea from the port of Dover to France. First-class passengers were not obliged to disembark and special sea locks were created in Dover and Dunkirk so that the trains could connect with the rails on the ferries whatever the height of the tide. ( It was said that the clanking of the chains used to secure the trains during the sometimes choppy crossings ensured that passengers were deprived of a good night's sleep,)

Nagelmackers looked for new horizons, in particular the idea of an entire Wagon-Lits train rather than a collection of luxury carriages attached to someone else's train. He dreamed of a fabulous rail journey by express train across Europe, from the gaiety of Paris to the exotic capital of the East. Despite having to negotiate with the eight different railway compaies that operated between the two cities,

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Source

Fifty Railways that changed the course of History.

By Bill Laws

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