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, with a large passenger traffic in the winter, or a railroad in the North, with conditions reversed and travel running at high tide throughout the hot summer months, could hardly afford to place the investment in sleeping and parlor cars to meet its high-tide needs, and have those cars grow rusty throughout the long, dull months.  The Pullman Company, by moving its extra cars backward and forward over the face of the land in regiments and in battalions, keeps them all earning money.  It meets unusual traffic demands with all the resources of its great fleet of traveling hotels.

Last summer, when the Knights Templars held their convention in Denver, it sent four hundred and fifty extra cars out to the capital of Colorado.  And this year it is bending its resources toward finding sufficient cars to meet the demands for the long overland trek to the expositions on the Pacific Coast.

The transition from the Pioneer to the steel sleeping car of today was not accomplished in a single step.  A man does not have to be so very old or so very much traveled to recall the day when the Pullman was called a palace ear and did its enterprising best to justify that title.  It was almost an apotheosis of architectural bad taste.  Disfigured by all manner of moldings, cornices, grilles and dinky plush curtains—­head-bumping, dust-catching, useless—­it was a decorative orgy, as well as one of the very foundations of the newspaper school of humor.

Suddenly the Pullman Company awoke to the absurdity of it all.  More than ten years ago it came to the decision that architecture was all right in its way, but that it was not a fundamental part of car building.  It separated the two.  It began to throw out the grilles and the other knickknacks, even before it had committed itself definitely to the use of the steel car.

Recently it has done much more.  It has banished all but the very simplest of the moldings, and all the hangings save those that are absolutely necessary to the operation of the car.  It has studied and it has experimented until it has produced in the sleeping car of to-day what is probably the most efficient railroad vehicle in the world.  Our foreign cousins scoff at it and call it immodest; but we may reserve our own opinion as to the relative modesty of some of their institutions.