Could someone explain the Pullman Company business model to me?
Did Pullman pay the railroads to haul their cars? On one hand it seems like they would have, as they were running their own “hotels.” But OTOH, the railroads benefited from having the Pullmans on the train; those passengers, I assume, had to buy a regular ticket as well as the Pullman one; so the sleepers helped the railroads sell regular tickets, plus provided customers for the dining car.
Briefly, how did the money flow?
I’ve now learned that the railroads paid the Pullman Co. (generally a mileage rate) to use the Pullman cars on their trains. This generated sales of first-class tickets sold by the railroads, and such tickets were required by anyone wishing to buy a Pullman berth. Having these people aboard also generated dining car business.
The Pullman Company, separately, sold Pullman tickets for the actual accomodations. So they got that revenue on top of what the railroads paid for using the cars. A Pullman conductor dealt with the Pullman tickets, not the railroad’s regular conductor.
In some contracts, the Pullman Company would forgive some/all of the mileage charges once a certain level of revenue from Pullman tickets was reached on that particular train.
and somehow they had a monopoly and got into Anti-Trust trouble?
Pullman Company’s monopoly was that they insisted in being the only builders of the equipment that was operated in Pullman service within the USA. In the late 30’s the Budd Company built the streamlined Denver Zephyr with sleeping cars - Pullman Company and the CB&Q got into a level of warfare about this. While they ‘ironed things out’ it set off the monopoly ‘ear worm’ that ended up in the Anti-Trust actions taken against the Pullman Company. A number of legal precedents were set in the course of the case.
In general before the 1948 breakup Pullman owned the sleepers that were leased by the railroad companies, even the ones painted for the railroads. This blurred a bit in the 1936-1948 timeframe, where many lightweight “Pullmans” were railroad owned and leased back to Pullman. Post-breakup only “pool” cars were owned by Pullman.
In the postwar model Pullman operated both pool cars and leased railroad-owned sleepers (many formerly owned by Pullman and assigned in the breakup). Cars not needed by the owning railroad at any given time could be temporarily re-assigned by Pullman, sometimes for extended periods. This gave a large measure of flexibility for seasonal and special operations, and for emergency replacements on regular assignments.
Regular Pullman cars were assigned to “lines”, with a particular type of car assigned to the line. Pullman eventually dropped the requirement for a Conductor on trains with only a single car, allowing the porter to collect the Pullman tickets. Trains with multiple Pullmans had Pullman Conductors into the 1960s.
Some railroads operated their own sleepers but still had contracts with Pullman to get access to the pool. Soo Line operated its own sleepers but used Pullman pool cars extensively on their popular summer trains operated with Canadian Pacific (not a Pullman customer).
Some other railroads operated Pullman lines on specific trains to handle interline cars even after they had taken over operation of their own sleeping cars. New York Central dropped its overall contract with Pullman in 1958, but carried Pullmans for the Southern and C&O into the mid-1960s.
See if you can find ‘Travel by Pullman - a century of service’ by Joe Welsh & Bill Howes.
very interesting, never quite sure how it all worked. Only experience on a Pullman was when 2 friends and I took a sleeper bedroom to CA in 1965. None of us wanted to ride alone in a seat on coach, so this was the solution. Dad booked our tickets thru UP sales office and there was an extra surcharge on the basic coach fare for the bedroom. My understanding was UP got the coach portion and Pullman the extra fare, never knew how they divided up cost of hauling the cars. Dad always said regular conductor was still the boss or “brains” as Mom always called them. I saw that when our train backed into St. Louis Union Station and the N&W conductor came back to tweet the whistle as the Pullman conductor stood beside him. N&W took us to KC where we were switched over to UP and then switch over at Ogden to SP. On return trip we were able to ride the all Pullman UP City of Los Angeles train to Ogden, had dome diner and fancy lounges, then back to reality when our cars were put on UP City of St. Louis. Glad I did get to experience it one time, other train trips were in coach with parents. Have taken Amtrak sleepers but all the same train not divided like it was with Pullman.
very interesting, never quite sure how it all worked. Only experience on a Pullman was when 2 friends and I took a sleeper bedroom to CA in 1965. None of us wanted to ride alone in a seat on coach, so this was the solution. Dad booked our tickets thru UP sales office and there was an extra surcharge on the basic coach fare for the bedroom. My understanding was UP got the coach portion and Pullman the extra fare, never knew how they divided up cost of hauling the cars. Dad always said regular conductor was still the boss or “brains” as Mom always called them. I saw that when our train backed into St. Louis Union Station and the N&W conductor came back to tweet the whistle as the Pullman conductor stood beside him. N&W took us to KC where we were switched over to UP and then switch over at Ogden to SP. On return trip we were able to ride the all Pullman UP City of Los Angeles train to Ogden, had dome diner and fancy lounges, then back to reality when our cars were put on UP City of St. Louis. Glad I did get to experience it one time, other train trips were in coach with parents. Have taken Amtrak sleepers but all the same train not divided like it was with Pullman.
Yes, so far as the operation of the train was concerned, the railroad conductor was in charge–and the Pullman conductor (or porter in charge if there were only one Pullman in the train) was in charge of the service rendered in the Pullmans. The two conductors would come through the Pullmans together, and the railroad conductor would take the “transportation” and the Pullman conductor would take the “space.”
I really do not recall how it was, if the porter took my two tickets or if the conductor was with him, when
My late father was a Pullman conductor for 25 years right up to the day in 1971 that Amtrak took his job so the reference to conductors ending in the 60’s is not correct. The Pullman conductor had to be up and around at every stop to board ticketed passangers and or sell space.
I believe that the Pullman Company ceased operations on December 31, 1967. The remaining Pullman routes were taken over by the various railroads and porters and in some cases Pullman conductors were picked up by the railroads.
Pullman carried on through 1968. My last trip with a Pullman conductor was in late November that year.
Johnny, how long were you a passenger train conductor? And on what road?
I am sorry if I have given the impression thatI ever worked for a railroad. All I can do is recount my interactions with many different railroad employees–men who worked in stations and men in road service. Forty-five and more years ago, because of my interactions, I did various things that I would not dream of doing now because the companies are much stricter now than they were back then, such as, when I lived at the north end of the AT&N, I played brakeman, switch tender, street crossing flagman, and engineer (I would run an engine around the wye). Once, an IC conductor invited me to help him sort his tickets (you might be amazed at the different ticket forms used by different roads).
Aha. And I was thinking I had just forgotten what railroad you worked for.
(When you wrote “My last trip with a Pullman conductor was in late November that year.” I took that to mean you were the railroad’s train conductor, working the same train that a Pullman conductor did also.)
In other words, you just had way more fun than most people!!
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Yes, I have told people that I did not have a toy train to play with when I was little, so when I got out into the world, I began playing with the real thing. I was always careful to get permission to do whatever I did. Usually, I asked men whom I knew or men who, even though I did not know them personally, knew who I was. I did ask the superintendent of the Tennessee Division of the IC for permission to ride the engine of #1 from Memphis to Grenada, Mississippi, and he granted me permission. I also asked the superintendent of the Louisiana Division for permission to ride the engine from Jackson to New Orleans (the same trip), and his response was that they did not grant such permission.
Chapter 5 of the book “The Early Zephyrs” by Geoffrey H. Doughty has a rather explanation of the conflicts with the Pullman Company that the CB&Q encountered when the introduced the Budd built Denver Zephyr and how thing ultimately ended up in the court case of the United States vs. Pullman Company.
To be honest, the thing did not end up with US v. Pullman, in 1941: that was only the beginning of the effective part. In my opinion the culmination was here:
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/64/108/1952998/
(which contains a brief synopsis of the situation, and the course of events that followed the Court decision to ‘break the Pullman monopoly’.
Perhaps with a little hindsight, it’s pretty clear that the Court’s veiled hints that Pullman, if they chose the sleeping-car business over carbuilding, would still be bound by significant constraints in the judgment. I remember reading as early as the Sixties that Pullman-Standard and its evolving freight-car business was, even in the mid-Forties, a much better “business” than providing sleeping-car service.
Someone has surely told the story, though, about what Otis and Glore-Forgan thought they were going to acquire with the ‘premier’ national sleeping-car service. This was, just like steam, something that would unravel in perceived value with dramatic speed in the following years … and it wouldn’t matter if one of those firms, or the railroads as an interested group, tried to make the franchise continue to pay as when it was the only real ‘thinkable’ option for long-distance travel…
It is my understanding that the “Pullman Co” that is the onboard franchise was jointly owned based loosely on the sleeping car mileage each participating “owner” operated. So a RR “bought” a car from P-S, ACF, Budd, St Louis Car, leased it to the Pullman Co which maintained it supplied fresh linens, had the drinks concession in a sleeper/lounge car, etc. If a given car was OOS for maintenance, and the owning road did not have a substitute from its own fleet, an agreed car rom among the leased cars was used. Asnoted by others NYC had dropped out for its own trains, but NYC cars in Pullman Lease were available for special movements. In my files of several California Zephyr consists in 1961, older NYC sleepers are shown operatad for tour group usage.
And actually, Pullman is still with us if you follow the Corporate Lineage. Their freight car building was sold to Trininty Industries. Remaining Passenger car plans were sold to Bombardier as Pullman Technology but then the company continued on and merged with Whelabrator-Frye in 1980 as Pullman, then sold to Waste Management and I think they are independent now as Pullman Power LLC. Here is their website:
https://www.pullman-services.com/
A purchase of the Pullman Company in 1987 that was later sold to Tenneco in the late 1990’s…
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/27/business/company-news-pullman-agrees-to-buy-clevite.html