(The following column by Henry Kisor appeared on the Chicago Sun-Times website on December 16.)
CHICAGO — Armies march on their stomachs. Rail travelers ride on theirs.
A good experience in the dining car will lead even the fussiest passenger to ignore just about any rail-borne inconvenience. GrandLuxe Express, the luxury land cruise operator of independent, four- to 10-day-long rail voyages that cost as much as $17,000 a couple, subscribes to this truth. It feeds its passengers extraordinarily well.
Early last November my belly and I were guests of GrandLuxe and Amtrak aboard a joint endeavor, a “GrandLuxe Limited” train of seven luxurious private cars hauled behind Amtrak’s California Zephyr on its picturesque route between San Francisco Bay and Chicago.
The GrandLuxe “voyages” (they don’t call them trips) were the remnants of a hopeful experiment announced last spring, a collaboration for 90 one- and two-night rides this winter on private cars hauled by scheduled Amtrakers between Chicago, Denver, San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and several Florida cities. The idea was to test the waters for super-luxury, high-nostalgia accommodations on regular Amtrak runs.
That had been done before, most recently by GrandLuxe’s predecessor, American Orient Express, but such experiments have never been financially successful. Neither, it seems, was this one.
Sufficient demand never materialized for the vast majority of the trips. There just wasn’t time to market them effectively, both GrandLuxe and Amtrak said. And the announcement was made just as the U.S. economy began to cool. Three-day, two-night voyages started at $1,599 a person and one-nighters at $789. That’s a lot of money for a traveler with a nervous eye on the stock market.
Whether Amtrak and GrandLuxe will collaborate in the future is uncertain — that’s a decision that will be made early next year, GrandLuxe officials said. But for those who made bookings on the California Zephyr runs, the six GrandLuxe rides behind that train were a fine taste of the luxury the company offers on its longer, independent land cruises.
Those regular-season tours visit the Western
and Northwestern national parks, Mexico’s Copper Canyon, California’s Napa Valley, the antebellum South from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., and they include side trips via motor coach to off-rail sights. Seven-day rides cost $4,290 a person and up; 10-day runs as much as $8,520 each.
A new special is an eight-day golfers’ trip in which the train calls at six top courses on its way from New Orleans to the nation’s capital. Rates start at $4,320 a person; golfing is extra. (For all of GrandLuxe’s offerings and rates, visit www.americanorientexpress.com.)
Haute cuisine to go
Who are GrandLuxe’s land cruises for? Those who are richer than you and me, of course. But any of these trips would be suitable for regular folks looking to splurge on a big celebration, such as a 50th wedding anniversary or honeymoon.
A large part of GrandLuxe’s clientele is made up of retirees, although on the brief trip I took, a father brought along his sweet 13-year-old daughter and a mother her high-school-age son, both as special treats. GrandLuxe welcomes children older than 8 — this type of travel doesn’t suit squealing babies.
In a nutshell, the three-day, two-night trip I took constituted a five-star restaurant aboard a five-star rolling hotel whose windows faced some of the country’s best scenery. A butler assisted by two maids caters to the passengers’ every need in the sleeping cars, bringing morning coffee and pastries to the compartments and preparing the berths for the night while their occupants are at dinner.
The exteriors of all the restored half-century-old Pullman-built cars are painted in gleaming blue, cream and gold livery. Their art deco interiors are paneled in rich mahogany veneers. All sleeper cabins have a toilet and washbasin, and the bigger ones have showers.
The equally opulent dining car features comfortable tables and chairs, and its appointments are impeccably tasteful. So, for the most part, is the young, cheerful and remarkably efficient waitstaff, even though one pretty waiter’s pearl tongue thtud theemed incongruouth in thuch an elegant thetting.
Every meal was a glorious experience. The menu’s description of one five-course dinner included a jumbo lump crab cake appetizer and an entree choice of venison tournedos or pecan crusted tenderloin accompanied with whipped sweet potatoes and sauteed haricots verts, followed by a dessert of amaretto biscotti and fresh fruit.
Is your mouth watering yet?
Just two weeks before, my wife and I had ridden VIA Rail’s posh The Canadian from Toronto to Vancouver, and we thought its cuisine was the grandest we had ever had on a train. But GrandLuxe’s towers above it as a tureen does a teacup.
What’s the hurry?
An Amtrak train is unabashedly democratic, offering all social classes a chance to mingle in the diner, whether they like it or not. Aboard the GrandLuxe dining cars, however, one does not encounter baseball caps, mullets, jailhouse tattoos and wife-beater undershirts. The official GrandLuxe dress code is “resort casual” — polo shirts and khakis. Come dinnertime, many guests break out the jackets and jewels, and a few even don black tie.
The luxurious club car features overstuffed chairs of the kind in which Gilded Age plutocrats might have enjoyed brandy and cigars, plus a merry pianist who plays an eclectic medley of tunes each evening. There is a bar, of course, but I saw none of the overlubricated boisterousness that often occurs in Amtrak lounge cars.
GrandLuxe allows smoking only between cars, but the smoke doesn’t seep inside, for the vestibule windows can be opened to the breeze. This is also a boon for those who want to take photographs from the train. For safety reasons, Amtrak doesn’t permit passengers to open vestibule windows, while GrandLuxe trusts its clientele with cameras to be sensible about hanging their faces out in the dust and gravel kicked up by a train running at 79 mph.
All of GrandLuxe’s cars date back to the 1950s but were completely rebuilt in the late ’80s for American Orient Express. They still seem in decent shape for their age, though a tad worn at the edges. But they are maintenance hogs, as veteran rail passenger cars tend to be; all that shaking, rattling and rolling loosens things. A mechanic rides aboard the train to slap Band-Aids on immediate problems (usually toilets, the air conditioning and potable water systems).
In the past such woes have disappointed some GrandLuxe passengers, judging from comments on the Internet. But they did not cause my train to tie up in Chicago 31⁄2 hours late. The usual delays facing a passenger train on a heavily traveled freight railroad were to blame.
I just read some more Murder on the Orient Express and patted my tummy.
(Henry Kisor is a retired Sun-Times staff member and the author of Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America. His newest mystery novel, just published, is Cache of Corpses.)