A few weeks ago, I submitted a call for anyone from IRM who could help with an upholstery question.
I'd like to thank George (Buzz) Morisette and the Andersons, who have and are continuing to help. It's so nice to get genuine help from so far away.
Buzz has been most helpful with better photos of upholstery from several IRM cars, but the material appears not to be that which Pullman built their c1900 sleepers with.
My research is pointing to the possibilty that the New South Wales Railways' Pullmans may have been upholstered with olive bronze coloured cloth, as were the American Pullmans of that era.
So I'm broadening my query to ask if anyone out there knows just what this olive bronze colour actually is.
An internet search hasn't been of any success.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers, Bob

Bob,

The walkover seat on the right in this exhibit is covered in what I believe to be your Pullman Olive Bronze fabric. It has the feel of velour but is of stronger stuff.



E-mail me an address and I will send you a swatch, I believe I still have some fabric at the Museum: dfisher@rmli.us

Good luck, it's a start,
Don Fisher

Railroad Museum of Long Island

An update on this subject.
I recently dug deeper into the reference in The American Railroad Passenger Car to this colour. The footnote to the reference went to the Railroad Gazette of July 7, 1876.
I found this on the net and what it was about was a report on two Pullman cars at an exhibition. It describes a Drawing Room car with seats "covered with some material of one of those colours for which only the experts have names. It is somewhere between the colour of new bronze and olive."
Hardly a colour "olive bronze"!
And this is only chairs, not sleeping car berths.
Further research at the New South Wales Archives was fruitless in terms of finding an exact reference to what colour the NSW Pullman seats may have been upholstered in, but in the final hour of my 3 days' researching, I looked in an Annual Report which had a table of goods imported for the NSWR in that financial year and there was a reference to a sizeable quantity of "white haircloth" fabric arriving from England on the Sydney wharves 3 weeks after the noted build date of the 3 AL Pullmans.
There had been an earlier reference to these and other Sydney-built Pullman copies
being upholstered in white cloth, but I had my doubts, thinking it was a most impractical colour for a steam-era sleeping car.
Next, I was talking to a former Carriage Works employee recently, who said he recalled the old timers saying that the Pullmans had white satin seat coverings! Now, they may not have been satin, but the colouring tees up.
So, against all apparent logic, the evidence is showing that perhaps they had white covers after all.
I'm arranging for a supplier of hair cloth in China to send me some samples, so that could be intertesting.
Stay posted, carriage lovers.
Cheers, Bob

Further to my last posting, it now appears almost certain that AL1040 was upholstered in white haircloth.
Recent trawling of digitised newspaper clippings found that the 6 Pullman-built sleepers were upholstered in haircloth by the NSW Railways and were also painted by them, not Pullman. This was in 1891.
Further, an article from 1899 describes a trip with new copies of the original Pullman-built cars, done in comparison so the NSWR could show they could build cars as well as Pullman. In this article the upholstery is described as "figured white cloth."
Given that white seems to have been used from 1891 to 1899, I think it's fair to assume that despite all logical thought, they found white to be a serviceable colour and that the ALs, built in 1901, carried on with this practice.
Finally, a big thanks again to those RYPNers who went to the trouble of helping, even though the search for the elusive "olive bronze" proved to be a trip up the wrong road.
Cheers, Bob