A friend of mine recently purchased some items at an estate sale. Included were the four items pictured, which he thinks may have been napkins from railroad dinning cars. Any help in advising exactly what these were, would be appreciated. Note that each napkin is placed upon the previous one and the last one from the Rock Island measures 16 inches wide by 14-1/2 inches high.

Thanks.

Les

Les,
They are towels not napkins. Napkins would be made from a finer linen. Most of the dining car napkins I ever ran across in pre-Amtrak days were usually white or a pale color such as yellow which I ran across on the C&NW, with the railroad's name or herald visible but very lightly embroidered into the fabric.
Don C.

Those Pullman "napkins" are actually towels that would have been in every bedroom, roomette and washroom.

They're a neat detail to add to a car, filling up those empty shelves in the bedrooms and roomettes. I had found references to Porters describing folding up the towels in triangles; I then found not only an image of the towels folded in triangles, but (in a heavyweight) being displayed standing up on the racks!

http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/ ... 8181-2.jpg

http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/d8181b.htm

Later, I found a promotional article in 1950 extolling the new Nickel Plate Pullman cars (which of course, included our 'City of Lima'). Photos of a roomette show the towels on the shelf above the sink.

In the 1952 "Instructions to Porters, Attendants and Busboys", discussion of the multitude of towels to be deployed is listed on pages 62-64.

"In private room accommodations the setup of towels is as follows:
rooms having only one bed.........4 towels
rooms having two beds...............6 towels
rooms having three beds............ 8 towels
master room…..6 towels plus 2 large and 2 small bath towels

In rooms having overhead towel racks or shelves, towels shall be folded triangularly and placed with the point to the front. In rooms having toilet cabinets or recessed shelves, towels shall be folded into a square and placed in stacks of two or three, spaced evenly on shelves in an orderly manner".

So, how do you fold the towels? Doesn't say. We played around, and came up with a method for doing it, for what it's worth:

http://webusers.warwick.net/~u1042417/Pullman.htm

For excursion use, we substitute 15" x 26" herringbone-weave Barbers' Towels, with the blue stripe to approximate their appearance with an item you wouldn't mind people wiping their hands with!

John Isaksen
Erie Lackawanna Dining Car Preservation Society

Nice PP about the towel folding. Not to quibble but an old AT&SF porter showed me how he was trained to do it. When folding the towel in thirds you overlap such that the new height is smaller then you acheived by folding it the way that you did (maybe an inch less).

Next fold at a 45 degree angle like you were folding old glory. Fold from the left and right at the same time. You will meet in the middle with a left triangle and a right triangle sharing the same vertical fold. If you see here that the towel does not turn out to equal triangles then you know that the step of folding over the towel was not done with the proper overlap. Retry and you will get the hang of it.

Once you have done it a few times you can turn out left and right hand triangles at the same time and as great speed.

Once folded press them down hard with your hands and they will basically stay in those triangle shapes. You can then stand them up and spread them open like you see them in the photos.

Good job. We applaud the preservation of proper Pullman techniques.

T7

Termite:
Thanks for relating the primary source. Probably was a "figure it out yourself" sort of procedure, so I am not surprised if there are a bunch of ways to do it.

From the photos, it looks like they're intended to be more or less an equilateral triangle, which is why for point of illustration I used a draftsman's triangle in the powerpoint. I'm sure in actual practice they were just laid out using the ol' "eyeometer", as one of my costume designer friends would say ;^).

One of the citations I came across quoted a Porter (I think it was in Perata's "Those Pullman Blues", though I couldn't find it on a quick scan through this morning) where the towels were folded so that "they'd stay together if you threw them across the room". So that was one of the of the tests we'd required when coming up with that folding scheme! That last tuck-under does it. Additionally, by spreading apart the bottom a bit, they will stand by themselves.

In any event, it's a little detail that adds a nice bit to interpretation of Pullman service. And, if anyone has a definitive instruction on how to fold the silly things, please let us know!

Just for comparison, here is a B&O napkin currently on ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/3-VINTAGE-RAILROAD-DINING-CAR-NAPKIN-BALTIMORE-AND-OHIO-/120654046749?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c178aa61d

I have been working towards reproducing these for either the Erie or the Lackawanna. Like china and silver the linens have patterns. Most were damask made in England, later from mills in the U.S.

That is a great napkin. I think reproductions of those would be well received.

Did you ever see those candid dining car pictures that sold on Ebay...maybe a year ago (or longer)...sold by "pork chops toy store"? Those really had some wonderful images inside of various B&O diners. I hope somebody working with diner restorations got hold of those pictures.

T7

The ELDCPS has been collecting interior photos of dining cars (from all railroads) for quite some time. So much so that we are planning on doing an all dining car calendar for 2012. We hope to have it available by late Spring/early Summer 2011.

Years ago I read a article/book? on the Southern Pacific Dining Car service.

The SP bought only tablecloths, as the tablecloths became worn or damaged, the SP seamstresses would cut them down into napkins and the like.