Reinventing The Train

By John Skow

The modern airliner, as all know, cleverly compresses the minor irritations of several days or weeks of travel into a few hours of astonishing misery. There is no need to speak of the automobile, superb for drive-in banking, exasperating for other uses. What else is there? Dog sledding, backpacking? Each has its merits. Hot-air ballooning? Lovely, but lacking direction. Are we forgetting something?

Ah yes, trains. Lonesome whistle blowing, clickety-clack that takes you back, gone 500 miles when the day is done. The 20th Century Limited and the Super Chief, chuffing grandly through the memories of geezers. You told me that already, Grandpa.

The news here is that the railroad train has been reinvented splendidly. On Nov. 8 at 5:55 p.m., three sleepers, a piano club car and a dining car of the American-European Express, each refitted to five-star, died-and-went-to-heaven standards, will leave Washington's Union Station and roll into legend. The next morning at 10:17, some 50 cosseted passengers, dreamy from a night of love and laughter, aslosh with breakfasts that on a recent test run from Panama City, Fla., to Atlanta included crepes with crabmeat, followed by eggs, spinach, hollandaise sauce and baby lamb chops, will arrive at Chicago's Union Station.

| A week later, regular five-car, six-night-a-week service from both Chicago and Washington will begin, with American-European Express running as self- contained segments of regular Amtrak trains. "On the seventh day," says Bill Spann, the Panama City resort owner who heads the venture, "we polish mahogany." There is a lot to polish, all solid wood, installed by cabinetmakers who usually work on yachts.

This is not a cheap undertaking. A salvageable railroad car can cost as little as $25,000, but outfitting it may run to nearly $1 million. A walk through the St. Moritz club car, lately a derelict on a siding in Milwaukee, with broken windows and a cargo of snow, made the figure plausible. The bar is black granite, the baby grand piano an ebony Baldwin. Walls are paneled in embossed dark green leather. Brass, art deco lamps match the brass soffit, a three-inch strip separating walls from a car-long mural of mountain peaks. The ceiling is a rich deep blue, night sky. The car is designed for night, with lamps turned down, and a pianist plays show tunes. Too much good taste becomes bad taste, but this is just right.

So in the dining car are the softly lighted oil paintings, the white linen, the oversize European-style forks and knives, the private-stock California sparkling wine, the seven stately courses of dinner (a just and seemly number, the traveler comes muzzily to feel), the white and the red wines, the port, and, yes, please, the cognac. Conversation ramifies, and 2:30 a.m. ticks roguishly into view. The foresighted journeyer will have made an appointment to use his car's shower next morning, and the porter will knock at the proper time with a bathrobe. At breakfast, a driven soul may have a cellular phone brought to the table to cancel some airline reservations or fax the menu (of course there is fax) to his worst enemy.

Will the new train fly? Spann's collaborators in the venture are the owners of Europe's Nostalgie Istanbul Orient Express, a train of elaborately renovated antique cars that last year rolled from Paris, across Russia and through China to Hong Kong, and then, after a sea voyage, across Japan. The Orient Express works well as a tourist charter, but this chichi choochoo, as one Chicago paper tagged it, will need business people, lobbyists and boodling politicians to fill its regular runs. Its $695 one-way, single-occupancy fare (up to $1,042.50 for two, and $1,450 for two in a presidential cabin) may be a bit too radioactive for middle-level expense accounts.

American-European is convinced that it has a winner: after all, flying first class and paying for meals and a luxury hotel room can cost more than its fares. Bookings are chugging along nicely, and additional routes are not out of the question: New York to Chicago, New York to Miami, and -- who knows? -- Chicago to Salt Lake City. (Chicago to Los Angeles? No, the thinking goes; too far, too much time.) For now, travelers arriving rested -- their knees not contused by seat backs, their ears not jangled by memorized prattle about smoking materials and tray tables in their upright positions -- may discover they actually like Chicago and Washington, two spacious and civilized cities. They may even find, almost but not quite too late for this hurried century, that traveling -- how amazing! -- is a pleasure.