For a number of years steel sills and under frames had furnished a staunch foundation for all cars manufactured by the Pullman Company for its operation. Further strengthened by steel vestibules, it is to be doubted if the all-steel car offered any very material increase in the safety already afforded to the passengers. But the change which the steel car brought in the process of manufacture was radical in the extreme. The first Pullman cars, and in fact every car up to and through the nineties, was of all-wood construction. Wood-making machinery filled the great shops at Pullman; carpenters and cabinet-makers numbered a big percentage of the pay roll. It was a wood-working industry. At one fell stroke the old order changed to the new. The songs of the band-saw and the planer were stilled and in their stead rose the metallic clamor of steam hammer and turret lathe, and the endless staccato reverberation of an army of riveters. Ponderous machines to bend, twist, or cut a bar or sheet of steel filled the vast workrooms. An army of steel workers, Titans of the past reborn to fulfill a modern destiny, fanned the flames in their furnaces and released the leash of sand blast, air hose, and gas flame. [Illustration: This machine is at work punching holes for screws etc. in the steel for the inside finish] [Illustration: This great power press is engaged in shaping the steel panelling for the inside finish of the car] But fascinating as unquestionably was the work of the patient artisans who inlaid the beflowered Eastlake Pullman or the Moorish cars of another day, there is equal romance in the product of the modern worker who builds these rolling hostelries of steel. Under the high glass roof the tumult of ponderous machines fills the air with pandemonium. At one side of one of the main aisles a half dozen great steel girders, like keels for giant ships, lie on the floor. These are the mighty box girders, eighty-one feet in length and weighing over nine tons each, which will form the backbone of future Pullmans. To each of these girders, or sills, are riveted plates, angles, and steel castings which extend the full length of the car and platforms, as well as floor beams, cross bearers, bolsters, and end sills of pressed steel. On this foundation the side sills are riveted, steel beams that run the entire length of the car. When this gray mass of steel is finally riveted together with its coverplates, tieplates, and floorplates, the underframe of the car is completed--an almost indestructible foundation which alone weighs 27,365 pounds. On this underframe the superstructure or frame is erected to form the body of the car. This frame is composed of pressed steel posts and plates forming for each side a complete girder which would by itself alone carry the entire weight of the loaded car.