The private sleeping room was not where the sleeping car began. For most of its first eighty years the typical American sleeper was an open dormitory: rows of facing seats that a porter turned into curtained bunks each night, with strangers sleeping a few inches apart. The Pullman Company did build a car with nothing but enclosed rooms in 1911, yet the society of engineers that later honoured that car notes that all-room design did not become commonplace until the late 1930s.
The long history of the berth, then, is less a story of luxury than of arithmetic: how many people a railway could fit into a carriage, and how much it could charge each of them for privacy. Following that trade-off from the curtained bunk to the hotel-style suite explains why today's grand trains look the way they do, and why some of their most celebrated cabins were once something quite different.
Pullman did not invent the sleeping car
The most durable myth in this field is that George Pullman invented the railway sleeper. He did not. Sleeping cars of various kinds were running on American lines before his, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, in its citation for one of his surviving cars, puts it plainly: Pullman built and operated sleeping, lounge and parlor cars from 1859, but was not a man for originating new inventions. His gift was adoption and operation. He was among the first to fit the enclosed vestibule between cars, the Westinghouse air brake, knuckle couplers, steam heating, Pintsch gas lamps and electric light, and he ran his cars as a national service with uniform standards. The longer story of the man is told in our profile of George Pullman and the American palace car.
What Pullman perfected was the section: a pair of facing day seats that became a lower berth at night, with an upper berth stowed overhead. Accounts of the upper berth's mechanism differ. Some describe it hanging from the ceiling on ropes and pulleys at its four corners; the Smithsonian's account describes upper berths that folded down out of the ceiling rather than being lowered on pulleys. Both may be true of different generations of car. What no source disputes is the hierarchy: the upper berth was the cheapest accommodation in the car, reached by ladder, with a curtain for a door.
The open car and its curtained economy
The section suited a continent of long distances and price-conscious travellers. By day the car was a parlour of seats; by night the same floor space slept twice as many people as it seated in comfort. Privacy was sold in small increments. Above the section sat the drawing room and the compartment, enclosed spaces that commanded higher fares, but for decades they were the exception within a car rather than the rule.
Construction changed long before layout did. Pullman's first all-steel car, the Jamestown, was built in 1907 and proved too heavy; a lighter standard structure followed, and production began in January 1910 with a car named Carnegie. Some 10,000 of these heavyweight steel sleepers were built in various configurations, the last in 1931, and the great majority carried open sections.
The Glengyle and the arrival of the room
The exception that survives is the Glengyle, built in 1911 during the first year of steel-car production and assigned to the premium New York to Florida trains. It was one of the first sleepers to contain only enclosed rooms. It stayed in service in that original configuration until 1957 and now belongs to a railway museum in Dallas; ASME designated it a historic mechanical engineering landmark in 1987.
The all-room car became normal in America only in the late 1930s, and the device that made it affordable was the roomette. Pullman timelines and the company's own brochures place its introduction in 1937: a small, fully enclosed single room with a bed that folded into the wall. The duplex roomette went further, setting rooms on two slightly different floor levels so that they interlocked, the lower bed sliding beneath the floor of the neighbouring room. The aim was the old one, more paying occupants per car, now achieved behind a lockable door instead of a curtain.
- 1859 - Pullman begins building and operating sleeping cars.
- 1872 - Georges Nagelmackers founds the company that becomes the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (some sources give 1873 or 1874).
- 1907 - Pullman's first all-steel car, the Jamestown.
- 1911 - The all-room Glengyle is built.
- 1929 - Wagons-Lits introduces its LX series of Grand Luxe sleeping cars.
- 1937 - The Pullman roomette appears.
- 2018 - Three Grand Suites are created aboard the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express.
Europe chose the compartment
European sleeping-car design began from a different premise. Georges Nagelmackers travelled widely by train in America and came home impressed by Pullman's night service but critical of its comfort. The company he founded is usually dated to 1872, although sources disagree; National Geographic says he had formed his own company by 1873, and some accounts give 1874, the year one history assigns to his first Paris to Vienna sleeping-car route. His founding story is told in our article on Nagelmackers and the European sleeping car.
Wagons-Lits cars were built around the closed compartment entered from a side corridor, an arrangement whose origins are explored in the invention of the corridor coach. A European traveller expected a door. That expectation is why the great Wagons-Lits expresses, from the Orient Express of 1883 onward, are remembered for their cabins and the craft lavished on them, culminating in the interwar marquetry and glass described in our piece on Lalique, Prou and the Wagons-Lits interiors, rather than for any feat of berth engineering.
The LX and the price of a single bed
The high point of the interwar compartment was the LX, a Grand Luxe series built for Wagons-Lits in 1929 and 1930. Model-railway and enthusiast references describe the original cars as first-class sleepers with a single bed per compartment, used on the Calais-Mediterranee Express, the train better known as Le Train Bleu. The same sources say many compartments were later converted from one bed to two to meet post-war demand. That detail rests on secondary sources, but the direction of travel is consistent with everything else in this history: when demand rose, space per passenger fell.
It is also worth correcting the assumption that the Orient Express itself ended with the age of steam. The name survived in the European timetable, in ever more ordinary form, until December 2009, by which time it was a modern overnight train with one sleeping car and couchettes.
From compartment to suite
The century's final turn reversed the old arithmetic. Restored LX cars from 1929 now run on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, and in March 2018 the train received three Grand Suites, named for Paris, Venice and Istanbul and designed by Wimberly Interiors. Belmond described the work as transforming individual classic cabins into three suites, each with a private lounge and its own shower room. In other words, the most expensive accommodation on the train was made by taking compartments out of service. Where Pullman's engineers once fought to fit 24 rooms into a car, a modern operator removes beds to sell fewer, larger ones.
Where the history can be slept in today
Much of this story can still be slept in. The 1929 LX compartment survives on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, running between cities such as Paris and Venice, where the same train also carries the suites cut from its classic cabins. Elsewhere the closed cabin entered from a side corridor, the European inheritance, remains the basic unit of trains such as the Belmond Royal Scotsman, the Eastern & Oriental Express and Rovos Rail's Pride of Africa, each of which has resolved the old trade-off between beds and space in its own way. The open section, by contrast, survives mainly in museums. For a wider view of the fleets, browse our full collection of luxury trains.
