But improvements came one by one--better devices for coupling them together, culminating in the modern automatic "jaw coupler," better framing, better platforms, better trucks, improved hand-brakes; and after them the now universal air-brakes made life safer both for the traveller and the railroad employee. Finally came the steel-end vestibule; and where cars have been equipped with this very comfortable device, telescoping in collision, a very common and disastrous accident in which one car-shell enveloped another, has been rendered impossible.
The car-platforms for many years remained a menace and a problem. An early railroad in New Jersey sought to emphasize their danger by painting on an inner panel of each car-door a picture of a newly made grave, surmounted by a tombstone, on which was inscribed: "Sacred to the memory of a man who stood upon a platform." The railroad used every method to keep its passengers off the platforms at first. Afterwards they began to encourage it and to devise means to promote a general intercourse between the cars.
The dining-car, of which much more in another chapter, was a prime factor in this change of attitude on the part of railroad officers. Its use necessitated passengers going the length of the train, a movement which, in itself, was facilitated by the main design of American cars, as differentiated from those of English railroads. When the English roads began the universal use of dining-cars they had to revamp the entire plan of their car construction and produce what are still known across the Atlantic as "corridor trains."
To make such communication safe, George M. Pullman, the sleeping-car man, set forth to devise a platform protection. Back in the fifties there had been something of the sort on the old Naugatuck Railroad in Connecticut, rough canvas curtains enclosing the platforms; but these had been built to facilitate car ventilation, and failing in this, they were abandoned after three or four years of trial. Pullman did better. He devised a platform enclosure of folding doors and placed a steel frame at the end of his vestibule that did more than merely protect passengers from the stress of weather; these, of course, then served as effective anti-telescoping devices. The Pennsylvania Railroad began the use of these vestibules in 1886 and they were soon universally adopted by American railroads on their fast through trains.