Riding America's Orient Express (July/August 2000 | Volume: 51, Issue: 4)

Riding America's Orient Express

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Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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July/August 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 4

 
 
 

I was sitting in a club car rescued from America’s greatest passenger train, the Twentieth Century Limited, when I first heard the phrase "cruise train." It made sense. The train I was traveling—privately owned but open to anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare—offered fine meals, attentive service, tiny but richly furnished sleeping compartments, a program of escorted bus tours to nearby sights, and onboard lectures. The concept certainly owed as much to the cruise industry as to present-day railroading, but its roots go back to a lavish style of rail travel that disappeared just before the living memory of most of my fellow passengers. So they and I were aboard American Orient Express’s new-old train, on an excursion entitled Pacific Coast Explorer, attempting to relive an era about as distant as that of the transatlantic ocean liner.

The weeklong trip ran from Los Angeles to Seattle, with stops for Santa Barbara, the Hearst Castle, San Francisco, the Napa Valley, and more. Passengers slept aboard all but one night, which they spent at San Francisco’s luxurious Huntington Hotel, atop Nob Hill. The hotel is named for Collis Potter Huntington, one of the founders of the Central Pacific, and its restaurant is hung with rare railroad memorabilia, making it an apt choice.

American Orient Express runs excursions nearly year-round on some of the U.S. and Canada’s most scenic and historic routes. Its fifteen-cartrain consists of two locomotives, two crew cars, six sleeping cars, two dining cars, a pair of club cars, and the sleek Twentieth Century Limited’s observation car, which first saw service in 1948. With that exception, most of the rolling stock originated from the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific and dates from between 1948 and 1958. It has been refitted with mahogany-paneled walls, painted faux marble insets, and etched-glass partitions. Each club car contains a grand piano and a variety of overstuffed chairs and sofas that might have been taken directly from grandmother’s parlor.

The locomotives are leased from Amtrak, and the conductor and the rest of the operating crew are Amtrak employees. The pilot is on loan from Union Pacific. In the way that a ship’s pilot reads the waters, the railbound version expertly navigates individual quirks of track and terrain. There is always an onboard lecturer; on our trip it was the highly knowledgeable Bob Johnston, who presided in the club cars most afternoons and was always willing to stay for one more question. One of his talks revolved around the complicated history of ownership along the tracks we were traveling. From the early 1920s, he said, when more than a dozen railroads carried freight on this route, “it’s all come down today to two railroads in the West.” They are the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (its multiple names revealing its lineage) and the Union Pacific. As the train rolled past a vast golden valley north of Sacramento,