1. How long were wooden construction Pullman sleepers employed on passenger trains? If they finally disappeared was there any legal mandate to retire them?
2. Were heavyweight Pullman sleepers all eighty footers? What about seventy footers? Were there ever any sixty or sixty-five foot Pullmans built and used?
Hello,
There wasn't a specific mandate to retire wood sleeping cars. With the opening of the six PRR/LIRR tunnels into Manhattan around 1912, it was decided that wood cars would not be permitted in these tunnels for safety's sake.
Steel underframe, wood bodied passenger cars operated well into the 1950s especially on commuter lines and branch line service. Some continued into the 1970s in M-of-W service. Many serviceable all-wood cars were given a steel underframe to extend their lives by a few years.
Wood simply fell out of favor as advantages of steel construction became a matter of economy and longevity in service. The first all steel cars were appearing around 1904-05.
Pullman, of course, liked to "standardize" and the majority of its heavyweight sleeping car fleet was at 82' over pulling faces. Other car lengths for coaches, commuter cars and head end equipment varied based on particular railroad's preferences.
Trains_BuildingCar005 by Edmund, on Flickr
Pullman by Edmund, on Flickr
Good Luck, Ed
Some of the wooden sleeper cars on the CNR lasted into the mid-'50s, although many were not Pullman-built. Most were from other Canadian roads which were absorbed by the CNR when it was created in 1923. A lot of them were around 50 years old when they were either downgraded for things like MoW service, or simply scrapped. When Pullman was forced to divest parts of its business, the CNR (and I'm sure many American roads, too) bought the Pullman cars and leased them back to Pullman. Many of the CNR cars were modernised with Adlake sealed windows, and mechanical air conditioning, and when CN re-equipped with lightweight cars, many of the older Pullman cars were sold to railroads all over North America, and to private buyers, too.
Some of the early wooden sleeper cars were less than 80'ers, and most were truss rod cars, although many of those cars later got steel underframes. Some also were sheathed-over in metal, too.
I recently converted a couple of old Rivarossi 12-1 Pullmans into CNR 8-1-2 Pullmans...
...while most of my Rivarossi Pullman cars were converted into coaches, as my freelanced roads aren't long enough to merit sleepers, other than as a means of transferring them from one connecting road to another...
Wayne
Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines operated wooden MU cars post-WW2 until the NJ PUC put its foot down.
And I found this "According to the Pullman lot lists, the last wood-bodied cars built for its own general service were 10 sleepers in Lot 3808, dating to 1910.". Now, what Pullman did was to keep a pool of its oldest cars for use as "Tourist Sleepers", charging bargain rates in the Summer and for charters going to sporting events, conventions, etc. So by the Twenties, the wooden Pullmans would have been retired to this service (and remember with the newest cars being from 1910, many would have been from the turn of the century). I am guessing, here, but I would think with newest wooden cars being twenty years old and with the drop in traffic due to the Depression, the last wooden Pullmans were scrapped around 1930.
Morning
Dunno alada Pullman info. Dono him Fiddler like-em
Only ting better den de Pullmans, tis da passenger set Great Northerns of. End da extra not in da box one.
Him Fiddler need somepens behind da steamer ta pull man
P.S. Thanks for the interesting Pullman information here Gents
TF
Wood cars were considered far less safe compared to all-steel cars; they were destroyed in a wreck more easily, and tended to catch fire in a wreck too. Being able to advertise it's use of all-steel cars on it's trains became a big selling point for railroads in the 1920s.
Note that a fair number of woodsided cars were rebuilt with steel sides, or steel sheathing. However, when railroads started buying streamlined cars in the 1930's, it meant they had fairly new heavyweight cars from their top trains that filtered down to lesser trains, at which time wood cars were either gotten rid of or assigned to work train service. (FWIW I saw some 80' woodsided cars wearing faded GN "Empire Builder" green and orange" in work train service in the 1980s on BN.)
The PRR may have been instrumental in the conversion. In1910 the tunnels into Manhattan were opened and they banned wood cars from the tunnels for safety reasons.
Another factor was that about 1910 the US government required that all RPO cars - railroad owned cars carrying US Post Office clerks - had to be all-steel construction for the safety of the clerks. Ticket-buying passengers riding in wooden cars felt like their safety wasn't as valued as the safety of the postal clerks in the steel cars and complained.