Varnish For The Nabobs (June 1956 | Volume: 7, Issue: 4)

Varnish For The Nabobs

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Authors: Lucius Beebe

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June 1956 | Volume 7, Issue 4

When, in the Colorado mid-Seventies, the Rocky Mountain News of Denver reported that aboard “Nomad,” the narrow-gauge private car of General William Jackson Palmer, builder of the Rio Grande Railroad, there was both hot and cold running water, the old gentleman was outraged. Not only did the discussion of such intimate matters constitute a violation of privacy: it also made him—an old campaigner—out to be a sybarite and downright softy.

Things have changed in the eight decade’s since General Palmer. Hot and cold running water no longer seem a luxury of Babylonish proportions in an age which takes functioning marble fireplaces, deep-freezes, built-in wine cellars, murals by celebrated artists, and air-conditioning for granted.

Indeed the change for what he would have regarded as the worse came in General Palmer’s own time, for in the Eighties the Count Boni de Castellane wrote in his diary that aboard the entire private train of George Gould full evening dress was expected at dinner, which was served by liveried house footmen off gold plates from Tiffany.

The golden age of the private railroad car was, obviously, the bright noontide of the nabobs who took pleasure in such ornate and often beautiful conveniences and could afford to possess and maintain them. The privately owned Pullman was, from the mid-Seventies until the stock market, an accepted and conventional symbol of wealth. Only a handful survive today.

In the East they were cherished and maintained in gleaming splendor by entire generations and dynasties of Goulds, Harrimans, Vanderbilts, Fricks, and Wideners and rolled elegantly from Palm Beach to the Adirondacks, to Bar Harbor and Louisville, as the season and occasion dictated. They clustered familiarly as late as the mid-Twenties in swarms of twenty or thirty at a time on the private car track of the now vanished Royal Poinciana Hotel at Palm Beach, and at Derby time the Louisville & Nashville’s yards at Louisville saw their arrival at the end of every inbound varnish train for days at a time.

In the Old West they were the affluential hallmark of the presence of silver kings from the Comstock, copper monarchs from Butte, the old bearded Silver Senators of Nevada and Montana, cattle magnates and all the departed generation of Emperors of Get and Satraps of Power. Success on the prairies and in the tall timber rode the private palace cars in frock coats and passed out dollar cigars to the reporters on arriving in San Francisco, Virginia City, or Fort Worth. It drank vintage champagne in jeroboams and delighted in gold-plated plumbing fixtures and brass-bound observation platforms rolling through the high passes of the Sierra or through the sagebrush night.

The private railroad car was a way of life. To a certain extent it still is.

A modern generation of railroaders makes a sharp distinction between the privately owned Pullman operated for the pleasure, convenience, and social occasions of its proprietor and the business