Wason Manufacturing Company
rolling stock manufacturer
The Wason Manufacturing Company was a maker of Trolleys & Passenger railroad cars during the Progressive Era until the Great Depression. The company was founded in 1845 in Springfield, Massachusetts by Charles Wason (1816-1888) and Thomas Wason (1811-1870). Although the concept would later be popularized by the Pullman Company, Wason was the first to manufacture sleeping cars in America.
Wason's earliest clients included the Michigan Southern Railroad (1846–1855), Alton Railroad, Central Railroad of New Jersey, and Boston and Maine Railroad, as well as foreign operators such as the State Railway of Chile, and Egyptian National Railways, providing the latter with 161 cars as well as an ornate state carriage for Sa'id of Egypt, the viceroy at that time. By 1867 the company had about 300 employees. The company made the first passenger coaches used on the Transcontinental railroad. One of these became the personal rail car of Leland Stanford, President of the Central Pacific Railroad. By 1868 the company had consolidated with the Springfield Machine Company, keeping the name Wason Manufacturing.
Around 1900 Wason concentrated on manufacturing streetcars and electrified railway cars. Clients included the Holyoke Street Railway Company and Manhattan Railway Company.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Wason Manufacturing Company” is rolling stock manufacturer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Wason, Manufacturing and Company, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wason Manufacturing Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.