Sleeping car

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Image:Chicago and Alton Railroad Pullman car interior c 1900.png The sleeping car or sleeper is a railroad passenger car that can accommodate all its passengers in beds of one kind or another, primarily for the purpose of making nighttime travel more restful. Some of the more luxurious types have private rooms, that is to say fully and solidly enclosed rooms that are not shared with strangers.

In the United States, all regularly scheduled sleeping car services are operated by Amtrak. Amtrak offers sleeping cars on most of its overnight trains, using modern cars of the private-room type exclusively. In Canada, all regularly scheduled sleeping car services are operated by VIA Rail Canada, using a mixture of relatively new cars and refurbished midcentury ones. The latter cars include both private rooms and "open section" accommodations (the latter to be described later in this article). 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-configuration seating during the day and privacyless double- or triple-level bunk-beds at night. Even more basic is the Chinese "hard" sleeping car in use today, consisting of fixed bunk beds, which cannot be converted into seats, in a public space. Chinese trains also offer "soft" or deluxe sleeping cars with two beds per room.

The first sleeping car appeared in the 1830s, but was not economically successful. The man who made the sleeping car business profitable in the United States was George Pullman, who began by building an unusually luxurious sleeping car (named Pioneer) in 1865. The Pullman Company, founded as the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1867, owned and operated most sleeping cars in the United States until the mid twentieth century, attaching them to passenger trains run by the various railroads. (There were also some sleeping cars that were operated by Pullman but owned by the railroad running a given train.) During the peak years of American passenger railroading, several all-Pullman trains existed, including the 20th Century Limited on the New York Central Railroad, the Broadway Limited on the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Panama Limited on the Illinois Central Railroad, and the Super Chief on the Santa Fe Railway. 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. In the 1920's the Pullman Company went through a series of restructuring steps, which in the end resulted in a parent company, Pullman Incorporated, controlling the Pullman Company (which owned and operated sleeping cars) and the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company. In 1947, in consequence of an antitrust verdict, a consortium of railroads bought the Pullman Company from Pullman Incorporated, and from then on railroads owned and operated Pullman-made sleeping cars themselves. Pullman-Standard continued in the manufacture of sleeping cars and other passenger and freight railroad cars until 1980.

From the nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, the most common type of sleeping car accommodation on North American trains was the "open section". "Open section" accommodations consist of pairs of seats, one seat facing forward and the other backward, situated on either side of a center aisle; the seat-pairs can be converted into the combination of an upper and a lower "berth", each "berth" consisting of a bed screened from the aisle by a curtain. As the twentieth century progressed, an increasing variety of private rooms came to be offered. Most of these rooms provided significantly more space than open-section accommodations could offer; some of them, however, such as the rooms of the misleadingly named "Slumbercoach" cars manufactured by the Budd Company and first put into service in 1956, were triumphs of miniaturization.

Today, Amtrak operates two main types of sleeping car: the bilevel Superliner sleeping cars, built from the late 1970's to the mid 1990's, and the single-level Viewliner sleeping cars, built in the mid 1990's. In the most common Superliner sleeping car configuration, the upper level is divided into two halves, one half containing "Bedrooms" (formerly "Deluxe Bedrooms") for one, two, or three travelers, each Bedroom containing an enclosed toilet-and-shower facility; and the other half containing so-called Roomettes (formerly "Economy Bedrooms" or "Standard Bedrooms") for one or two travelers; plus a beverage area and a toilet. The lower level contains more Roomettes; a Family Bedroom for as many as two adults and two children; and an "Accessible Bedroom" (formerly "Handicapped Bedroom") for a wheelchair-using traveler and a companion; plus toilets and a shower. The Viewliner cars contain an Accessible Bedroom (formerly "Handicapped Bedroom") for a wheelchair-using traveler and a companion, with an enclosed toilet-and-shower facility; two Bedrooms (formerly "Deluxe Bedrooms") for one, two, or three travelers, each Bedroom containing an enclosed toilet-and-shower facility; so-called Roomettes (formerly "Economy Bedrooms", "Standard Bedrooms", or "Compartments") for one or two travelers, each Roomette containing its own unenclosed toilet and washing facilities; and a shower room at the end of the car.

A particularly interesting practice in sleeping car operation, one that is not currently employed in North America, is the use of "set-out" sleepers. In this practice, sleeping cars are picked up and/or dropped off at intermediate cities along a train's route, so that what would otherwise be partial-night journeys can become in effect full-night journeys, with passengers allowed to occupy their sleeping accommodations from mid evening to at least the early morning.

One possibly unanticipated consequence of the rise of Pullman cars in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was their effect 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, contributing to the nucleus of the nascent black middle class. And, like all the other railroad trades, the porters came to be unionized. Their union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 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. Because they moved all about the country, Pullman porters also became an important means of communication for news and cultural information of all kinds. The African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender gained a national circulation in this way. Porters also used to resell phonograph records bought in the great metropolitan centers, greatly adding to the distribution of jazz and blues and the popularity of the artists.

Image:CFR new sleeper.jpgIn 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 once again specializes in sleeping cars, along with onboard railroad catering. In present-day Europe, a substantial number of sleeping car services continue to operate, though they face strong competition from high-speed day trains and budget airlines. In the United Kingdom, a network of trains with sleeping cars operates daily between London and Scotland, and between London and the West Country as far as Cornwall. Using rolling stock designed and formerly operated by British Rail, these services offer a choice of single- or double-occupancy bedrooms. A very modern company, is CityNightLine officed in Switzerland and is controled by the SBB-CFF-FFS. They service The Netherlands, Austria, Germany, and recently, Denmark. The services usually leave at around 20.00 hours and arrive at around 09.00 hours at the destination.

Another of the more substantial examples of current-day European sleeping car service is the Train Bleu, an all-sleeping-car train that has the longest-distance run of any train in France, from Paris to Nice. The train leaves the Gare d'Austerlitz in mid evening and arrives in Nice about 8 in the morning; it provides both first-class rooms and couchette accommodations. The train's principal popularity is with older travelers; it has not won the same degree of popularity with younger travelers, who, perhaps not fully appreciating the time-saving advantages of comfortable overnight sleeping car travel, are strongly drawn to budget flights or the daytime TGV.

Railroad sleeping cars, though reduced in prevalence in recent decades, retain a powerful ability to provide travel that is both exceptionally comfortable and remarkably time-saving, especially between points that are between 400 miles (ca. 600 km) and 1000 miles (ca. 1600 km) apart, distances that one can travel in a simple overnight trip, perhaps with dinner at the beginning of the journey and/or breakfast at the end. Persons traveling in this way, engaging in activities on board the train that are little more than the activities they would normally engage in at their home or in a hotel during the same hours, can annihilate time and distance more effectively than most high-speed day train travelers or air travelers on the same route could ever hope to. Even overnight sleeping car trips that also take up several hours of the preceding and/or following day can in many cases compare favorably with travel by high-speed day train, conventional-speed day train, or airplane, particularly when the origin and/or destination is a smaller community that is hard to reach by air. It is ironic that the airlines, with their increasing offers of bed-like accommodations for overnight flights, are only now beginning to permanently recognize the value of true rest during nighttime travel, and to permanently embrace standards of comfort comparable to those that railroads having been embracing for more than a century. (Airlines did offer sleeping-car-like accommodations on some planes in the mid twentieth century, but those services were rare and short-lived.) On certain trips, the use of sleeping car accommodations also offers the possibility of obviating one or two nights of hotel stay at the destination.

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See also

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External links

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