To make for luxury all manner of devices have been added to these cars. The superintendent sometimes hears complaints from a traveller that the sharp curves on some mountain division have spilled the water on his bath-tub; and the switching-crews at the big terminals know that turntables are kept busy turning the big observation platform cars so that they will "set right," and the big piazza-like platform will rest squarely at the rear of the train. For those persons who wish to pay for the luxury there are staterooms, and the best of these staterooms have the baths and big comfortable brass beds. After many years of unsatisfactory experiment the electric light has come into its own upon the railroad train; and even upon unpretentious trains the night traveller no longer has to wrestle with the difficulties of dressing or undressing in an absolutely dark berth. * * * * * Once the problem of housing folk at night had been met and solved, another rose. If travellers might sleep upon a train, why might they not eat there, too? The American eating-houses had met with a degree of fame. There are old fellows who will still tell you of the glories of the dining-rooms at Springfield, at Poughkeepsie, at Hornellsville, and at Altoona. But the eating-house scheme had its great disadvantages. For one thing, it caused a delay in the progress of through fast trains to halt them three times a day while the passengers piled out of the cars and went across to some lunch-counter or dining-room to ruin their digestions in the twenty minutes allotted for each meal. For another thing, the process of clambering in and out of the comfortable train in all sorts of weather was unpopular. The well-established and equally well-famed eating-houses along the trunk-line railroads were doomed from the time that the Pioneer won its first success. No more should a train tie up at meal-time than a steamboat should tie up at her wharf for a similar purpose. The first dining-cars were called hotel-cars; and the first of these, the _President_, was placed in operation by the Pullman company on the Great Western Railway--now the Grand Trunk--of Canada, in 1867. The hotel-car was nothing more or less than a sleeping-car with a kitchen built in at one end and facilities for serving meals at tables placed at the berths. It was well enough in its way, but travellers demanded something better, something more hygienic than eating meals in a sleeping place. Pullman went hard at his problem, and in another year he had evolved the first real dining-car, the _Delmonico_, which went into regular service on the Chicago & Alton Railway. The _Delmonico_ was a pretty complete sort of a restaurant on wheels, and not far different from the dining-car of to-day.