In addition to blotters, GN sent out brochures such as this one (which I found at the Minnesota History Center) inviting people to compare the railway’s new Oriental Limited with a vintage 1861 train consisting of the William Crooks, two coaches, and “a sleeping car of 1859, the oldest ‘Pullman’ in existence.”

Click image to download a 378-KB PDF of this brochure.

The 1859 sleeping car doesn’t appear in the photo shown on yesterday’s blotter, which pictured the Crooks, a baggage-coach, and a coach, the same as can be seen at the Lake Superior Railroad Museum today. As of 1859, George Pullman had not yet made a sleeping car from scratch, and there were plenty of other car manufacturers making sleeping cars including Case, Wagner, Woodruff, and others.

In 1859, however, Pullman and a partner, Ben Field, entered the sleeping car business by converting two Chicago & Alton coaches to sleeping cars. Nearly 40 years later, in 1897, Pullman (no longer partnered with Field) made what was supposed to be a replica of one of those cars, Pullman #9 (pictured here) for display at various fairs and expositions. The sleeping car company must have loaned that car to Great Northern in celebration of GN’s joining the Pullman family. That car survived to appear in the 1948-1949 Chicago Railroad Fair but was scrapped a few years after that.