TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/111389/11138900.078

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 5KB | 86 lines

TRAVEL, Page 104

Reinventing the Train

Overnight luxe rules on a run between Chicago and Washington

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.