How To Write Special Feature Articles, page 219 by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
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sal. "People are never going to pay their good money to ride in any such fancy contraption as that car of yours."
Then suddenly they ceased smiling. All America ceased smiling. Morse's telegraph was sobering an exultant land by telling how its great magistrate lay dead within the White House, at Washington. And men were demanding a funeral car, dignified and handsome enough to carry the body of Abraham Lincoln from Washington to Springfield. Suddenly somebody thought of the Pioneer, which rested, a virtual prisoner, in a railroad yard not far from Chicago.
The Pioneer was quickly released. There was no hesitation now about making clearances for her. Almost in the passing of a night, station platforms and other obstructions were being cut away, and the first of all the Pullman cars made a triumphant though melancholy journey to New York, to Washington, and back again to Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, in the hour of death--fifty years ago this blossoming spring of 1915--had given birth to the Pullman idea. The other day, while one of the brisk Federal commissions down at Washington was extending consideration to the Pullman porter and his wage, it called to the witness stand the executive head of the Pullman Company. And the man who answered the call was Robert T. Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln.
When Pullman built the Pioneer he designated it A, little dreaming that eventually he might build enough cars to exhaust the letters of the alphabet. To-day the Pullman Company has more than six thousand cars in constant use. It operates the entire sleeping-car service and by far the larger part of the parlor-car service on all but half a dozen of the railroads of the United States and Canada, with a goodly sprinkling of routes south into Mexico. On an average night sixty thousand persons--a community equal in size to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, or South Bend, Indiana--sleep within its cars.
And one of the chief excuses for its existence is the flexibility of its service. A railroad in the South, w