When Pullman built the Pioneer he designated it A, little dreaming that
eventually he might build enough cars to exhaust the letters of the
alphabet. To-day the Pullman Company has more than six thousand cars in
constant use. It operates the entire sleeping-car service and by far the
larger part of the parlor-car service on all but half a dozen of the
railroads of the United States and Canada, with a goodly sprinkling of
routes south into Mexico. On an average night sixty thousand persons--a
community equal in size to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, or South Bend,
Indiana--sleep within its cars.

And one of the chief excuses for its existence is the flexibility of its
service. A railroad in the South, with a large passenger traffic in the
winter, or a railroad in the North, with conditions reversed and travel
running at high tide throughout the hot summer months, could hardly
afford to place the investment in sleeping and parlor cars to meet its
high-tide needs, and have those cars grow rusty throughout the long,
dull months. The Pullman Company, by moving its extra cars backward and
forward over the face of the land in regiments and in battalions, keeps
them all earning money. It meets unusual traffic demands with all the
resources of its great fleet of traveling hotels.

Last summer, when the Knights Templars held their convention in Denver,
it sent four hundred and fifty extra cars out to the capital of
Colorado. And this year it is bending its resources toward finding
sufficient cars to meet the demands for the long overland trek to the
expositions on the Pacific Coast.

The transition from the Pioneer to the steel sleeping car of today
was not accomplished in a single step. A man does not have to be so
very old or so very much traveled to recall the day when the Pullman