The second year of Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition also happened to be the 75th anniversary of Pullman’s first sleeping car, so it issued this booklet praising its new aluminum passenger cars. The silver cover is supposed to remind people of aluminum, but since aluminum corrodes easily, all of Pullman’s aluminum cars were painted. The result is that the cover is more reminiscent of Budd’s stainless steel cars, which may have been an attempt to distract people from Budd’s truly innovative cars.
Click image to download a 5.7-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet.
Inside, the booklet praises Pullman’s innovations in the Union Pacific streamliner sleepers, such as metal privacy curtains and sinks in each of the sections. While useful, none of these were repeated in later Pullman sleepers. The booklet also devotes too much space to a phony conversation between “John” and “Mary” reminiscing about previous generations of Pullman sleepers.
Just as peculiar is the booklet’s drawing of Union Pacific’s M-10000 (which did not include a sleeping car), which is stretched across the inside-front and inside-back covers of the booklet. Someone would need to rip out all of the interior pages to see the entire train. I suppose Pullman marketers imagined this was artistic.