The hotel desk corresponds to the ticket office of the Pullman Company. Imagine a hotel with 260,000 beds and 2,950 office desks, and a total registration of 26,000,000 people each year. This is what the Pullman Company does, however, and incidentally it does it often at a mile a minute and in every state in the Union. The 2,950 offices where Pullman berths, seats, drawing rooms or compartments may be purchased include Quebec, Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Vancouver on the north; San Diego, El Paso, New Orleans, Key West, and Havana on the south; San Francisco on the west, and the seaboard towns of Maine on the east. Under normal conditions the southern limit is still further extended to fifty-six additional offices in the Republic of Mexico, as far south as Salina Cruz on the Gulf of Tehuantepec, and approximately two hundred miles from the boundary between Mexico and Guatemala, Central America.
The longest distance which it is possible to travel with a single Pullman ticket is from Portland, Maine, to San Francisco, by the way of Washington, D. C., New Orleans and Los Angeles. This cannot be done, however, in one sleeper, and changes must be made at New York and Washington. But a brief consideration of the perfect organization necessary to provide such continuous passage with berths reserved at each point of change by the mere purchase of a ticket at the starting point, grants to the Pullman Company a measure of credit due. In actual mileage the distance covered by this trip is 4,199.
President of the Pullman Company from 1897 to 1911]
As a rule the berths in sleeping cars and seats in parlor cars are on sale at the terminals of the different lines, but to provide facilities at intermediate points where the demand is sufficient to justify it, a limited number of sections are assigned for sale at such stations and tickets may be purchased from them on application. At stations of less importance and where the demand is not sufficient to assign any definite space, an arrangement exists whereby the vacant accommodations are telegraphed by ticket agents or conductors from point to point in order to accommodate passengers taking the trains at such stations. It is also possible and a very common practice to purchase a single sleeping car ticket between stations a great distance apart--for instance, between Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, via any of the ordinary routes of travel, by sufficient notice to the ticket agent to enable his reserving the accommodations, and it is also possible to purchase under similar conditions a sleeping car ticket in Havana, Cuba, for a berth, section, or drawing room from Key West, Florida, to Seattle, Washington, a distance of 3,923 miles, taking one hundred and thirty-three hours; not, however, without change, but in connecting cars, giving continuous sleeping car service over various routes.