The original Pullman Palace Car Co. had been organized on February 22, 1867. On January 1, 1900, after buying numerous associated and competing companies, it was reorganized as The Pullman Co., The best years for Pullman were the mid-1920s. In 1925, the fleet grew to 9800 cars. Twenty-eight thousand conductors and twelve thousand porters were employed by the Pullman Co. Pullman built its last standard heavyweight sleeping car in February 1931. Pullman purchased controlling interest in
Standard Steel Car Company in 1929, and on December 26, 1934, Pullman Car & Manufacturing, along with several other Pullman, Inc. subsidiaries, merged with Standard Steel Car Co. and its subsidiaries to form the
Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company. Pullman-Standard remained in the rail car manufacturing business until 1982. In 1943, Pullman Standard established a shipbuilding division and entered wartime small ship design and construction. The yard was located near
Lake Calumet in
Chicago, on the north side of 130th Street. Pullman built the boats in 40-ton blocks which were assembled in a fabrication shop on 111th Street and moved to the yard on gondola cars. In two years, the company built 34
Corvette Patrol Craft, Escorts (PCEs), which were 180 feet long and weighed 640 tons, and 44 Landing Ship, Medium (LSMs), which were 203 feet long and weighed 520 tons. Pullman ranked 56th among United States corporations in the value of
World War II military production contracts. Pullman-Standard built its last sleeping car in 1956 and its last lightweight passenger cars in 1965, an order of ten coaches for
Kansas City Southern. The company continued to market and build cars for commuter rail and subway service and
Superliners for
Amtrak as late as the late 1970s and early 1980s. Beginning in 1975, Pullman started delivery of the massive 754 stainless steel subway cars to the
New York City Transit Authority. Designated
R46 by their procurement contract, these cars, along with the
R44 subway car built by
St. Louis Car Company, were designed for speeds in the
Second Avenue Subway. After it was
deferred in 1975, the Transit Authority assigned the cars to other subway services. Pullman also built subway cars for the
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which assigned them to the Red Line. Pullman-Standard was spun off from Pullman, Inc., as Pullman Technology, Inc., in 1981, and was sold to
Bombardier in 1987.
Pullman antitrust case In
United States v. Pullman Co., 50 F. Supp. 123, 126, 137 (E.D. Pa. 1943), the company was ordered to divest itself of one of its two lines of sleeping car businesses after having acquired all of its competitors.
The end of Pullman After the 1944 breakup, Pullman, Inc., remained in place as the parent company, with the following subsidiaries: The Pullman Company for passenger car operations (but not passenger car ownership, which was passed to member railroads), and Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Co., for passenger car and freight car manufacturing; along with a large freight car leasing operation under the parent company's control. Pullman, Inc., remained separate until a merger with Wheelabrator, then headed by CEO
Michael D. Dingman, in late 1980, which led to the separation of Pullman interests in early and mid-1981. Operations of the Pullman Company sleeper cars ceased and all leases were terminated on December 31, 1968. On January 1, 1969, the Pullman Company was dissolved and all assets were liquidated. (The most visible result on many railroads, including Union Pacific, was that the Pullman name was removed from the letterboard of all Pullman-owned cars.) An auction of all Pullman remaining assets was held at the Pullman plant in Chicago in early 1970. The Pullman, Inc., company remained in place until 1981 or 1982 to close out all remaining liabilities and claims, operating from an office in
Denver. time table The passenger car designs of Pullman-Standard were spun off into a separate company called Pullman Technology, Inc., in 1982. Using the Transit America trade name, Pullman Technology continued to market its
Comet car design (first built for
New Jersey Department of Transportation in 1970) for commuter operations until 1987, when Bombardier purchased Pullman Technology to gain control of its designs and patents. As of late 2004, Pullman Technology, Inc., remained a subsidiary of Bombardier. Pullman, Inc., spun off its large fleet of leased freight rail cars in April 1981 as Pullman Leasing Company, which later became part of
ITEL Leasing, retaining the original PLCX
reporting mark. ITEL Rail Leasing (including the PLCX reporting mark) was later divested to
GE Rail Services. In mid-1981, Pullman, Inc., spun off its freight car manufacturing interests as Pullman Transportation Company. Several plants were closed and in 1984, the remaining railcar manufacturing plants and the Pullman-Standard freight car designs and patents were sold to
Trinity Industries. After separating itself from its rail car manufacturing interests, Pullman, Inc., continued as a diversified corporation, with later mergers and acquisitions, including a merger in late 1980 with
Wheelabrator-Frye, Inc., in which Pullman became a subsidiary of Wheelabrator-Frye, Inc. In January 1982, Wheelabrator-Frye merged with
M. W. Kellogg Company, a builder of large, cast-in-place smokestacks, silos and chimneys. Wheelabrator-Frye retained both Pullman and Kellogg as direct subsidiaries. Later in 1982
Signal acquired Wheelabrator-Frye. In 1990, the entire Wheelabrator-Frye group was sold to
Waste Management, Inc. The Pullman-Kellogg interests were spun off by Waste Management as Pullman Power Products Corporation, and by late 2004 that company was doing business as Pullman Power LLC, a subsidiary of Structural Group, a specialty contractor. As a side note, other construction engineering portions of Pullman-Kellogg were spun off as a new M. W. Kellogg Corporation, and in December 1998, became part of the merger that formed
Kellogg, Brown & Root, a specialty contractor which itself was later sold to
Halliburton, an oil well servicing company. In an eventual competitive move, other Kellogg engineering interests were merged with
Rust Engineering becoming Kellogg Rust, which itself became
The Henley Group, and later
Rust International before it became the Rust Division of what later became
Washington Group International, a specialty contracting firm that competes directly with Halliburton worldwide. Washington Group International (which was later acquired by
URS Corporation, and is now part of
AECOM) was the successor to the
Morrison–Knudsen civil engineering and contracting corporation, and was also the owner of
Montana Rail Link until the latter was acquired by the
BNSF Railway. After the last of the Kellogg interests of Pullman-Kellogg were spun off, and after the railcar manufacturing plants were sold, and with the formal dissolution of the old Pullman Company (the operating company from the 1944 split), the remaining portions of the Pullman interests were spun off in May 1985 by
Signal into a new Pullman Company. In November 1985, Pullman bought Peabody International and the new company took the new name of Pullman Peabody. In April 1987 (after Pullman Technology was sold to Bombardier), the name was changed back to Pullman Company. In July 1987 the company acquired
Clevite Industries. By 1996, Pullman Co., with its Clevite subsidiary, was almost solely a supplier of automotive
elastomer (rubber) parts, and in July 1996 the company was sold to
Tenneco. As of late 2004, Pullman Co. (now the brand name Clevite), as a manufacturer of automotive elastomer products, was still under the control of Tenneco Automotive. ==Company town==