Pullman Company
The Pullman Company, founded by George Pullman, was a manufacturer of railroad cars in the mid-to-late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century, during the boom of railroads in the United States. Through rapid late-19th century development of mass production and takeover of rivals, the company developed a virtual monopoly on production and ownership of sleeping cars.
During a severe economic downturn, the 1894 Pullman Strike by company workers proved to be a transformative moment in American labor history. At the company's peak in the early 20th century, its cars accommodated 26 million people a year, and it in effect operated "the largest hotel in the world". Its production workers initially lived in a planned worker community, known as a company town, named Pullman, Chicago.
Pullman developed the sleeping car, which carried his name into the 1980s. Pullman did not just manufacture the cars, it also operated them on most of the railroads in the United States, paying railroad companies to couple the cars to trains. In return, by the mid-20th century, these railroads would own Pullman outright. A labor union associated with the company, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded and organized by A. Philip Randolph, was one of the most powerful African-American political entities of the 20th century. The company also built thousands of streetcars and trolley buses for use in cities. Post-WWII changes in automobile and airplane transport led to a steep decline in the company's fortunes. It collapsed in 1968, with a successor company continuing operations until 1981.
History
After spending the night sleeping in his seat on a train trip from Buffalo to Westfield, New York, George Pullman was inspired to design an improved passenger railcar which contained sleeper berths for all its passengers. During the day, the upper berth was folded up overhead similar to a present-day airliner's overhead luggage compartment. At night, the upper berth folded down and the 2 facing seats below it folded over to provide a relatively comfortable lower berth. Although this was a somewhat spartan accommodation by today's standards, it was a great improvement on the previous layout. Curtains provided privacy, and there were washrooms at each end of the car for men and women. The first Pullman coach was built at the Chicago & Alton shops in Bloomington, Illinois in the spring of 1859 with the permission of Chicago & Alton President Joel A. Matteson.Pullman established his company in 1862 and built luxury sleeping cars which featured carpeting, draperies, upholstered chairs, libraries, card tables and an unparalleled level of customer service. Patented paper car wheels provided a quieter and smoother ride than conventional cast iron wheels from 1867 to 1915.
Once a household name due to their large market share, the Pullman Company is also known for the bitter Pullman Strike staged by their workers and union leaders in 1894. During an economic downturn, Pullman reduced hours and wages but not rents, precipitating the strike. Workers joined the American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs.
After George Pullman's death in 1897, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, became the company's president.
In 1922, Haskell & Barker Car Manufacturing was acquired and in 1924 was merged with the other car manufacturing units of Pullman, and a new company was formed, Pullman Car & Manufacturing Company. In 1927, Pullman Company was created as a separate company and Pullman Incorporated was established as a holding company. In 1930, Pullman purchased the Standard Steel Car Company conglomerate which included Osgood Bradley, Standard Motor Truck, and Siems-Stembel. In 1934, it was merged with Pullman Car & Manufacturing Company to be known as Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company.
The company closed its factory in the Pullman neighborhood of Chicago in 1955. The company ceased production after the Amtrak Superliner cars in 1982 and its remaining designs were purchased in 1987 when it was absorbed by Bombardier.
Corporate history
The original Pullman Palace Car Co. had been organized on February 22, 1867.On January 1, 1900, after buying numerous associated and competing companies, it was reorganized as The Pullman Co., characterized by its trademark phrase, "Travel and Sleep in Safety and Comfort."
In 1924, the Pullman Car & Manufacturing Corporation was organized from the previous Pullman manufacturing department and recently acquired Haskell & Barker Car Company, to consolidate the car building interests of The Pullman Co. The parent company, The Pullman Co. was established as its own company and Pullman, Inc., was formed on June 21, 1927.
The best years for Pullman were the mid-1920s. In 1925, the fleet grew to 9800 cars. Twenty-eight thousand conductors and twelve thousand porters were employed by the Pullman Co. Pullman built its last standard heavyweight sleeping car in February 1931.
Pullman purchased controlling interest in Standard Steel Car Company in 1929, and on December 26, 1934, Pullman Car & Manufacturing, along with several other Pullman, Inc. subsidiaries, merged with Standard Steel Car Co. and its subsidiaries to form the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company. Pullman-Standard remained in the rail car manufacturing business until 1982. Standard Steel Car Co., had been organized on January 2, 1902, to operate a railroad car manufacturing facility at Butler, Pennsylvania, and, after 1906, a facility at Hammond, Indiana, was reorganized as a subsidiary of Pullman, Inc., on March 1, 1930.
In 1940, just as orders for lightweight cars were increasing and sleeping car traffic was growing, the United States Department of Justice filed an anti-trust complaint against Pullman Incorporated in the U.S. District Court at Philadelphia. The federal government sought to separate the company's sleeping car operations from its manufacturing activities. In 1944, the court concurred, ordering Pullman Incorporated to divest itself of either the Pullman Company or the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company. After three years of negotiations, the Pullman Company was sold to a consortium of 57 railroads for approximately US$40 million, equal to $ today.
In 1943, Pullman Standard established a shipbuilding division and entered wartime small ship design and construction. The yard was located near Lake Calumet in Chicago, on the north side of 130th Street. Pullman built the boats in 40-ton blocks which were assembled in a fabrication shop on 111th Street and moved to the yard on gondola cars. In two years, the company built 34 Corvette Patrol Craft, Escorts, which were 180 feet long and weighed 640 tons, and 44 Landing Ship, Medium, which were 203 feet long and weighed 520 tons. Pullman ranked 56th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts.
Pullman-Standard built its last sleeping car in 1956 and its last lightweight passenger cars in 1965, an order of ten coaches for Kansas City Southern. The company continued to market and build cars for commuter rail and subway service and Superliners for Amtrak as late as the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Beginning in 1975, Pullman started delivery of the massive 754 stainless steel subway cars to the New York City Transit Authority. Designated R46 by their procurement contract, these cars, along with the R44 subway car built by St. Louis Car Company, were designed for speeds in the Second Avenue Subway. After it was deferred in 1975, the Transit Authority assigned the cars to other subway services. Pullman also built subway cars for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which assigned them to the Red Line. Pullman-Standard was spun off from Pullman, Inc., as Pullman Technology, Inc., in 1981, and was sold to Bombardier in 1987.
Pullman antitrust case
In United States v. Pullman Co., 50 F. Supp. 123, 126, 137, the company was ordered to divest itself of one of its two lines of sleeping car businesses after having acquired all of its competitors.The end of Pullman
After the 1944 breakup, Pullman, Inc., remained in place as the parent company, with the following subsidiaries: The Pullman Company for passenger car operations, and Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Co., for passenger car and freight car manufacturing; along with a large freight car leasing operation under the parent company's control. Pullman, Inc., remained separate until a merger with Wheelabrator, then headed by CEO Michael D. Dingman, in late 1980, which led to the separation of Pullman interests in early and mid-1981.Operations of the Pullman Company sleeper cars ceased and all leases were terminated on December 31, 1968. On January 1, 1969, the Pullman Company was dissolved and all assets were liquidated. An auction of all Pullman remaining assets was held at the Pullman plant in Chicago in early 1970. The Pullman, Inc., company remained in place until 1981 or 1982 to close out all remaining liabilities and claims, operating from an office in Denver.
The passenger car designs of Pullman-Standard were spun off into a separate company called Pullman Technology, Inc., in 1982. Using the Transit America trade name, Pullman Technology continued to market its Comet car design for commuter operations until 1987, when Bombardier purchased Pullman Technology to gain control of its designs and patents. As of late 2004, Pullman Technology, Inc., remained a subsidiary of Bombardier.
Pullman, Inc., spun off its large fleet of leased freight rail cars in April 1981 as Pullman Leasing Company, which later became part of ITEL Leasing, retaining the original PLCX reporting mark. ITEL Rail Leasing was later divested to GE Rail Services.
In mid-1981, Pullman, Inc., spun off its freight car manufacturing interests as Pullman Transportation Company. Several plants were closed and in 1984, the remaining railcar manufacturing plants and the Pullman-Standard freight car designs and patents were sold to Trinity Industries.
After separating itself from its rail car manufacturing interests, Pullman, Inc., continued as a diversified corporation, with later mergers and acquisitions, including a merger in late 1980 with Wheelabrator-Frye, Inc., in which Pullman became a subsidiary of Wheelabrator-Frye, Inc. In January 1982, Wheelabrator-Frye merged with M. W. Kellogg Company, a builder of large, cast-in-place smokestacks, silos and chimneys. Wheelabrator-Frye retained both Pullman and Kellogg as direct subsidiaries. Later in 1982 Signal acquired Wheelabrator-Frye. In 1990, the entire Wheelabrator-Frye group was sold to Waste Management, Inc. The Pullman-Kellogg interests were spun off by Waste Management as Pullman Power Products Corporation, and by late 2004 that company was doing business as Pullman Power LLC, a subsidiary of Structural Group, a specialty contractor.
As a side note, other construction engineering portions of Pullman-Kellogg were spun off as a new M. W. Kellogg Corporation, and in December 1998, became part of the merger that formed Kellogg, Brown & Root, a specialty contractor which itself was later sold to Halliburton, an oil well servicing company. In an eventual competitive move, other Kellogg engineering interests were merged with Rust Engineering becoming Kellogg Rust, which itself became The Henley Group, and later Rust International before it became the Rust Division of what later became Washington Group International, a specialty contracting firm that competes directly with Halliburton worldwide. Washington Group International was the successor to the Morrison–Knudsen civil engineering and contracting corporation, and was also the owner of Montana Rail Link until the latter was acquired by the BNSF Railway.
After the last of the Kellogg interests of Pullman-Kellogg were spun off, and after the railcar manufacturing plants were sold, and with the formal dissolution of the old Pullman Company, the remaining portions of the Pullman interests were spun off in May 1985 by Signal into a new Pullman Company. In November 1985, Pullman bought Peabody International and the new company took the new name of Pullman Peabody. In April 1987, the name was changed back to Pullman Company. In July 1987 the company acquired Clevite Industries. By 1996, Pullman Co., with its Clevite subsidiary, was almost solely a supplier of automotive elastomer parts, and in July 1996 the company was sold to Tenneco. As of late 2004, Pullman Co., as a manufacturer of automotive elastomer products, was still under the control of Tenneco Automotive.