Or any other heavyweight sleepers . . . Simple spotting features: The heavyweight Pullman sleeper offered only four accomodations -- section, bedroom, compartment, drawing room, in order of increasing cost or fare. All except the bedroom were based on the section, with its facing seats making the lower and the upper dropping from the ceiling. The section was marked by paired windows. The compartment was a section with the center aisle moved over and walled off to allow space inside the room for that most barbaric and bizarre of amenities -- the open toilet. Not until after WWII did Pullman provide accomodations for two passengers where one didn't have to step outside when the other hadda go. In fact, the two-person room with the toilet in the open survived into the Viewliner era, with the added fillip of windows in the corridor wall! Anyway -- the compartment was marked by the paired windows on the room side and some arrangement of windows on the aisle side. The drawing room was a section with the aisle moved over to leave space for a sofa; the toilet was enclosed in a separate room. Outside, it showed a pair of windows for the section, and a single fullheight window -- frosted -- for the toilet annex. The bedroom -- single or double -- was a crosswise sofa, with aisle to the side, which made down into a bed. The double had a parallel upper. The room had a single window -- and an open "hopper." Any car with sections had a dressing room for each gender, one at each end, and each had a toilet annex. The toilet had a single full height frosted window; the dressing room could have one or two raised bottom sill windows and maybe another full height window. Aisles had either pairs or single windows, often arranged to coincide with the doors to the rooms, so an open door would provide a view out the other side and diminish claustrophobia. A car with 12 sections would have room, after the two dressing rooms, for only a drawing room or, maybe, a compartment and a bedroom, or two bedrooms. Most cars with more than just one drawing room had but ten sections, affording much more room for other designs. So -- look for the paired windows. They denote the sections, compartments and drawing rooms. Oh! One more thing. Rooms at one end of the car were always on the opposite side from rooms at the other end. If all the rooms were at one end, the car could be said to have an "aisle side". If there were rooms at the other end too, there was an aisle side there and it was the other side. Now we can go to our photos and models and begin to figure out what we're seeing. Randy Brown ------------------------------
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