I have always loved trains.
Well, perhaps I don't love the average British Rail train, often canceled due to the wrong type of snow or there being leaves on the line, to use two classic cliches of discontinued service.
I am not alone in this by any measure.
Last week Accor joined forces with luxury goods provider LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton to invest in and accelerate the ongoing development of the Orient Express brand. The deal involves Belmond (already owned by LVMH) and the separate Accor brand, Orient Express. It will include hotels, trains and sailing ships.
It strikes me that this is a rare collaboration of two major hotel firms that have come together seemingly with the desire to better something that is bigger than the two firms' individual ownership of a particular travel niche, in this case trains.
But they know trains are very cool.
British novelist Lisa St Aubin de Terán wrote in in her 1989 book on train travel, “Off the Rails: Memoirs of a Train Addict,” that “trains are the vehicles of romance and adventure, a lifeline promising relief from dullness. I have woven a network of fantasy around the very concept of the train, so wide that the actuality of the journey can rarely outweigh the overall sense of glamour and daring which rail-travel has in my head.”
She particularly loved old trains, those almost on their last gasps of steam, and so do I.
One memorable trip of mine was from Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, across the Peruvian Andes to the Incan city of Cusco.
That train was ancient, before Belmond took over the route in partnership with PeruRail and made it into a luxury experience.
When I took it in 1998, it was a liveried in red and yellow, which just made it look even more rusty, but what an experience. It chugged its way up steep gradients to villages that only came to life when the train stopped for a few minutes. Hawkers of food and goods would run alongside the windows, and bands of nimble musicians would jump on, perform a song (hopefully something new, and definitely not “El Cóndor Pasa”) and then get chased off at the next stop by the train crew.
Old trains are always under threat of being modernized, and the traveler must remember that what might be romance for them is often just inconvenient and uncomfortable for others, mostly those who live in that place and rely on the train in their daily lives.
I have jumped on a train in Arctic Norway, in Ny-Ålesund, the world’s most northerly settlement, but unfortunately that train has been long out of service and mechanical ability.
There is the joy of the train that does a large half-circle of Yangon, the capital of Myanmar, which was an even bigger assault on the senses than the Peru train.
It travels for approximately 30 miles and stops off at 39 stations, and one can do the entire loop for the equivalent of a dollar.
If you like things clean as a whistle, commotion-free and upscale, then that dollar would not have provided value for money, but it was an exhilarating day.
Experience comes to you, not you to it, on a train.
The Accor-LVMH collaboration and both Accor and LVMH’s solo contributions to trains and train travel will breathe new life into the travel option, albeit at a hefty price.
Sleeping on trains is a wonderful thing, too, although the Caledonian Sleeper from London’s Euston Station to Fort William, far north in the Scottish Highlands, requires, for two, some dexterity in assuming a position in which it is possible to sleep and, more so, eat the breakfast provided.
The upshot is waking up in the middle of glorious nowhere seeing a deer stag standing on the brow of a hill and halting at lonely stations in which no one or few people alight or disembark, places with such wonderful names as Ardlui, Crianlarich, Bridge of Orchy and Rannoch, where not even train staff work.
Sleeping on a luxury train steeped in the history and Agatha Christie mythology of the Orient Express, as one example, and starting and finishing at luxury, equally famed hotels must be life-affirming, and one day I might throw caution or wads of cash to the wind and book such a trip.
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