Sleeping car

The sleeping car or sleeper is a railroad car with sleeping facilities. Some of the more luxurious types have real beds, and rooms not shared with strangers. In the United States, Amtrak includes this type of sleeping car on most of its overnight routes. In some other countries, such as South Africa, more luxurious sleeper services include ensuite shower rooms.

Related Topics:
Railroad car - United States - Amtrak - South Africa

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An example of a more basic type of sleeping car is the European couchette car, which is divided into compartments for four or six people, with bench seating during the day and double- or triple-level bunk-beds at night.

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Even more basic is the Chinese "hard" sleeper in use today consisting of fixed bunk beds in a public space. Chinese railroads, which unlike American railroads are in heavy daily use by the general public, also operate a "soft" or deluxe sleeper with two beds per compartment.

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The American cars made longer-distance travel by train more popular and enjoyable since they allowed truly comfortable sleeping on the train. The first sleeping car appeared in the 1830s, but was not economically successful. The man who made the sleeping car business profitable was George Pullman, who built a luxurious sleeping car (named "Pioneer") in 1865.

Related Topics:
1830s - George Pullman

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The Pullman Company owned and operated most such cars in the United States through the mid twentieth century, attaching them to passenger trains run by the various railroads. In addition, some sleeping cars were owned by the railroads running a given train but were operated by Pullman. The owner of a particular car was usually stenciled on the side of the car above the vestibule side doors.

Related Topics:
Pullman Company - Passenger train

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During the peak years of American passenger railroading, several all-Pullman trains existed, including the Super Chief on the Santa Fe railroad, and the 20th Century Limited on the New York Central Railroad. Pullman cars were normally a dark Pullman green, although some were painted in the host railroad's colors. The cars carried individual names, but usually did not carry visible numbers.

Related Topics:
Super Chief - Santa Fe - 20th Century Limited - New York Central Railroad

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After World War II the American railroads bought out the Pullman Company's sleeping car business and operated the cars themselves, though the cars usually were still named rather than numbered, and still carried the word 'Pullman' on them. Pullman, as Pullman-Standard, continued in the manufacture of railroad cars until 1980. With much passenger service having been abandoned from the 1930s through the early 1970s by American railroads, in May 1971 all but a few of the remaining intercity passenger operations were transferred to Amtrak, which today operates all of the remaining scheduled sleeping car services in the United States.

Related Topics:
World War II - Pullman-Standard - Railroad car - 1980 - Amtrak

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Today, Amtrak with some difficulty still operates the legacy American design of the 1950s, which was a lightweight car. One side of the car has a short single corridor, on which open two-bed "bedrooms" with washbasin and toilet, but no shower. Most of the car is a corridor between rows of single-person "roomettes" with a standard size bed and the same toilet facilities.

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More modern designs specifically for Amtrak finally incorporate a shower, but it is public access and demands physical skill in its use on American roadbeds. During the heyday of American rail travel, certain pricey rooms on premium trains including the Broadway Limited of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Twentieth-Century Limited of the New York Central had incorporated shower facilities.

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One unanticipated social consequence of the sleeping car was its convenience as a rendezvous site for lovers, who could be anonymous and free from the constraints of home. Important romantic scenes in such films as Some Like It Hot and North by Northwest take place in sleeping cars.

Related Topics:
Film - Some Like It Hot - North by Northwest

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Another unanticipated consequence was the effect of the Pullman car on civil rights and African American culture. Each Pullman car was staffed by a uniformed porter. These were almost always African-Americans and, by convention, were often addressed as "George" by passengers. Although this was servant's work, it was relatively well-paid and prestigious, and so Pullman porters were in a position to become leaders in the black communities where they lived, helping to form the nucleus of the black middle class. And, like all the other railroad trades, the porters came to be unionized. Their union became an important source of strength for the burgeoning civil rights movement in the early 20th century, notably under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph.

Related Topics:
Civil rights - African American - Porter - Middle class - Unionized - 20th century - A. Philip Randolph

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Because they moved all across the country and stayed in local black communities between shifts, Pullman porters also became an important means of communication for news and cultural information of all kinds. The black newspaper Chicago Defender gained a national circulation in this way. In particular, porters used to sell phonograph records bought in the great metropolitan centers, greatly adding to the distribution of jazz and blues and the popularity of the artists.

Related Topics:
Newspaper - Chicago Defender - Phonograph record - Jazz - Blues

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In Europe the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, French for International Sleeping Car Company, first focused on sleeping cars, but later operated whole trains, including the Simplon-Orient Express, Nord Express, Train Bleu, Golden Arrow, and the Transsiberien (on the Trans-Siberian railway). Today it restricts itself again to sleeping cars, and to onboard railroad catering.

Related Topics:
Europe - Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits - French - Simplon-Orient Express - Nord Express - Trans-Siberian railway

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In the immediate postwar period world-wide, experiments were made with democratising train travel which before the war had been divided into sharply distinct classes. These included a "sleeperette" service operated by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad on overnight runs between Chicago and New York or Washington.

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Here, experience in designing small crew quarters in WWII was applied in 1949 to creating smallish single and double rooms. Unlike the larger and more lavish "roomettes" and "bedrooms" of the standard post-war American Pullman, moving about these rooms was tricky for the larger American. Although they provided a slightly miniaturized form of the amenities of a Pullman for a small surcharge over coach, they never caught on with railway decision-makers, because the railways then, like the airlines today, found it wasn't profitable to give the budget customer much more than a minimal space.

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Thus, as the 1950s wore on to the near-demise of American passenger service in 1960 (the advent of the Boeing 707 jetliner), basic train travel converged on a coach service that was, ironically, equivalent in comfort to today's first class air travel, with an almost fully reclining seat and lavatories at the end of each car. It was possible then (and, for the train-obsessed today, on Amtrak) to travel overnight on America's vast spaces by coach and arrive in a civilized condition. Only the length of the trip made it much different from a first class airline voyage today, and humanely, no train passenger was ever subject to the rigors of (for example) a trip from Chicago to Beijing in today's "coach".

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Internationally, the same democratisation of train travel (which ended with the 1973 oil shocks) resulted in a service extant in the only American length voyage in France, the run from Paris to the Mediterranean, at Nice or Aix en Provence. This is the Train Bleu, an all sleeper service which leaves the Gare d'Austerlitz in mid-evening and arrives in Nice about 7:30 AM.

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Because the Train Bleu has no need of daytime accommodations, it can provide compartments at which strangers are stacked three to a side, vertical with respect to the axis of the car and connected by a single corridor in the European style. Toilets and washrooms are provided at each end of the car. The Train Bleu also provides first-class compartments.

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As is the case with Amtrak in the USA, however, the Train Bleu is preferred by the older and more sedate traveler while younger travelers prefer budget flights, or in a pinch one of the daytime TGV, which provide rapid coach service that cuts the journey down to a few hours, with much more French country and mountain scenery. Devised for the newly-leisured working class of postwar France and their new 8-hour day, the Train Bleu may ultimately disappear despite Gallic conservatism about French institutions.

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Another attempt to re-engineer the sleeping car were all-coach but overnight trains operated by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, again in the 1950s, for the two-night run between Chicago and Los Angeles. These provided in today's terms a first class airline seat and were heavily marketed by the Santa Fe in a pioneering tie-in with a visit to the first Disneyland in Anaheim.

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The fundamental diseconomy of the sleeping car, once the bugs were worked out of jet aviation, where the airplane rides above the frightening turbulence encountered by propellor craft, and once government oversight had standardized and made safe air travel, was that for most normal people, travel is not an end in itself, and most normal people will endure a standardized minimum of comfort to get from one place to another, at minimum cost.

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American railways of the 1950s had no way to accurately measure seat miles in the way today's airlines use these metrics, but their owners seemed to have realized that the market for sleeping car rooms was restricted to the wealthy and the upper middle class, and that this market would be an "early adopter" of jet transportation.

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Elsewhere, sleeper services continue to run. In the United Kingdom, a network of sleeper trains operates daily between London and Scotland, and between London and the West Country (as far as Cornwall). Still using rolling stock designed and operated by British Rail, these services offer a choice of single- or double-occupancy bedrooms, although their future is questionable as the Strategic Rail Authority has recently (2005) questioned the amount of subsidy they receive.

Related Topics:
United Kingdom - London - Scotland - West Country - Cornwall - British Rail - Strategic Rail Authority

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Only in China (and, to an extent, Asiatic Russia) today, does there exist a true mass market for sleeper service for in Europe, economic integration and budget airlines (along with privatization of rail service in the UK) have destroyed the appeal of overnight rail transport. However, the layout of the Chinese "hard sleeper" shows it more like the original American open sleepers with the disadvantage that unlike open sleepers, the Chinese beds do not convert to seats. The Chinese solution, like the Train Bleu, loses the charm of control of one's privacy that was a feature of the American sleeping car of the 1950s and becomes, like an airplane, a functional sardine can.

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