What was now specially aimed at was to make the train as close an approach to an actual hospital on wheels as circumstances would permit. "At present," wrote the Medical Director of the Department of Washington, "the sick and wounded are transferred in cars ill-adapted for the purpose and with difficulty spared from the other pressing demands; and lives are lost on the route not infrequently which, in all probability, might be saved by a more comfortable and easy method of transportation." The train he caused to be constructed consisted of ten ward-cars, one car for the surgeon and attendants, one as a dispensary and store-room, and one as a kitchen, etc. The ward-cars, arranged on an improved principle, each accommodated thirty recumbent and twenty or thirty seated patients. The train was to run regularly on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad between the theatre of war and the base hospitals at Alexandria and Washington. It was either to supplement or to supersede the freight cars with their bedding of straw, hay or leaves. If only from the point of view of the inadequate supply of rolling stock, a car fitted up to accommodate fifty or sixty patients offered an obvious advantage, in the speedy removal and distribution of sick and wounded, over a car, without fittings, in which the floor space alone could be utilised. Several complete trains of the type stated were soon running on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, within the Union lines, and the hospital train thus became an established institution in modern warfare. It was, however, in connection with the chief army in the West, the Army of the Cumberland, operating under General George H. Thomas, that the useful purposes which could be served by hospital trains became most conspicuous. The need for them in the West was even greater than in the East, because the distances to be covered were greater and lay, also, to a considerable extent, in enemy country.