(The following story by Paul Purpura appeared on the Times-Picayune website on November 17.)
NEW ORLEANS — Puffing on a cigarette and lounging in a chair upholstered in Persian mohair, Isaac Tigrett sat amid Asian splendor in the rear room of his Car 50.
There he told the story behind the 150-year-old Hindu carvings that adorned a maharajah’s prayer room in India until he acquired and installed them in the railroad car, which he began refurbishing more than a decade ago.
“It’s really a temple on wheels,” he said Sunday of the room, one of seven in Car 50. “It’s really one of the most peaceful places on the planet, and you can take it wherever you go.”
Built in the late 1920s, Car 50 once belonged to Tigrett’s great uncle, Isaac Burton Tigrett I, who in 1912 founded the Gulf Mobile & Ohio Railroad company. Since 1996, Tigrett has kept it parked at the foot of Esplanade Avenue, tucked behind the floodwall on a 200-foot-long siding he leases from the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad.
A founder of the Hard Rock Cafe and House of Blues, Tigrett said he now wants to sell Car 50 to help him finance the third in what he calls his business venture “trilogy,” a chain of supper clubs he plans to open beginning next summer in Nashville. “I’m going where the musicians are, or where there’s loads of folks,” he said.
With its three state rooms walled with original mahogany panels; a dining room; stainless steel and brass galley; servants quarters; and audio-visual, communications and security systems — along with art, stained-glass windows and rare cloth that Tigrett collected from around the world — the office car is valued at $2.8 million.
A vestige of the days when America’s elite moved by rail in their own office cars, Tigrett has used 100-ton, 98-foot Car 50 since the early 1990s as a focal point during grand openings for his House of Blues businesses, hooking it to Amtrak passenger trains for rides across the country at a cost of $1.40 a mile.
He said he hardly remembers all the celebrities he entertained in Car 50, though he names Dan Ackroyd and his family, the Blues Brothers Band and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.
Huey P. Long frequently rode on it, too, as guest of Tigrett’s great uncle. Dining one evening, Long, then a U.S. senator, supposedly quipped, “There may be smarter men than me, but they ain’t in Louisiana.” The words are inscribed in a plaque affixed to a wall in Car 50’s dining room, itself adorned with Gothic carvings Tigrett acquired from a church in England.
The railroad company remained in the Tigrett family until the first Isaac Tigrett’s death in the 1970s, when the business was acquired by another rail corporation, Tigrett said. Car 50 went with it, until about 18 years later, when Tigrett found it in Arkansas, bought it, refurbished it for $2 million and began using it for leisure and in grand openings and groundbreakings. Before he sells Car 50, he said, he hopes to tour the United States in it with his 16-year-old daughter.
“It’s part of my life,” Tigrett said. “I’m shattered that I have to sell it.”