Vestibuled train

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vestibuled train refers to a passenger train whose cars have enclosed vestibules at their ends, in contrast to the open platforms on early cars. Typically, a vestibule has doorways on either side to allow passenger egress at stations, a door into the body of the car, and, at the end of the car, a doorway to allow access to the next car through a flexible passageway.

Before the development of vestibules, passing between cars when a train was underway was both dangerous — stepping over a shifting plate between swaying cars with nothing on either side but chain guard rails — and unpleasant — due to the soot and cinders raining down from the steam engine's smoke plume. Because passengers were mostly confined to a single car, trains had regular meal stops built into their schedules, and sleeping cars were uncommon. The introduction of the vestibuled train in the late nineteenth century, led to dining cars, lounge cars, and other specialized cars.^[1]

During the 1880s and 1890s, the slogan "Vestibuled Train" was a magic term to railroad publicity deparments everywhere. More importantly, this development brought into existence the "train" in the sense we know it today — no longer a series of cars coupled together and pulling together, but a continuous unit for human uses. ... A whole new way of thinking about rail travel developed. You could eat and sleep on trains and [arrive] in a fraction of the previous time.^[2]

Vestibuled cars allowed the development of luxury trains during of the golden age of rail travel, trains like the Union Pacific's Overland Limited (1890), the Pennsylvania Railroad's Pennsylvania Special —later the Broad Way Limited — (1890) and the New York Central's 20th Century Limited, (1902). Tellingly, the Southern's famous Crescent was introduced in 1891 as the Washington and Southwestern Vestibuled Limited and widely known as The Vestibule.^[3]

[edit] References