The car-platforms for many years remained a menace and a problem. An early
railroad in New Jersey sought to emphasize their danger by painting on an
inner panel of each car-door a picture of a newly made grave, surmounted
by a tombstone, on which was inscribed: "Sacred to the memory of a man who
stood upon a platform." The railroad used every method to keep its
passengers off the platforms at first. Afterwards they began to encourage
it and to devise means to promote a general intercourse between the cars.
The dining-car, of which much more in another chapter, was a prime factor
in this change of attitude on the part of railroad officers. Its use
necessitated passengers going the length of the train, a movement which,
in itself, was facilitated by the main design of American cars, as
differentiated from those of English railroads. When the English roads
began the universal use of dining-cars they had to revamp the entire plan
of their car construction and produce what are still known across the
Atlantic as "corridor trains."
To make such communication safe, George M. Pullman, the sleeping-car man,
set forth to devise a platform protection. Back in the fifties there had
been something of the sort on the old Naugatuck Railroad in Connecticut,
rough canvas curtains enclosing the platforms; but these had been built to
facilitate car ventilation, and failing in this, they were abandoned after
three or four years of trial. Pullman did better. He devised a platform
enclosure of folding doors and placed a steel frame at the end of his
vestibule that did more than merely protect passengers from the stress of
weather; these, of course, then served as effective anti-telescoping
devices. The Pennsylvania Railroad began the use of these vestibules in
1886 and they were soon universally adopted by American railroads on their
fast through trains.
After that a better vestibule was devised by Col. W. D. Mann, one that
extended the full width of the car. In fact the platform of the car had
practically ceased to exist, the structure being full-framed to include
its entrances at both ends.
After the vestibule came the steel car, introduced within the past ten
years for freight service, and within the past five or six for passenger
equipment. It has everything to commend it, save a slightly increased
original cost, which is more than compensated by economy of maintenance,
to say nothing of the intangible but certain raised factor of safety. It
is to become universal; the wooden car will become extinct upon American
railroads almost as soon as the present equipment is worn out and sent to
the scrap-heap.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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