Romancing the rails: see New England and French Canada in style onboard America's premier private train - American Orient Express

Travel America, May-June, 2003 by Betsa Marsh

AS THE CAR PICKS UP SPEED, the brilliant patches of scarlet, orange, and plum begin to swirl into one fiery banner outside my window.

It's an exciting blur, just as exciting as writer Henry David Thoreau found his New England woods 140 years ago. "We love to see any redness in the vegetation ... it is the color of colors. (It) speaks to our blood. It asks a bright sun on it to make it show to best advantage, and it must be seen at this season of the year."

Mother Nature's annual spectacle thrills 21st century passengers booked on "Autumn in New England & Quebec" a new itinerary for the American Orient Express, a luxury train. I'm lucky to be savoring the fall kaleidoscope from my compartment window, rather than trying to catch the show. in a car, unfanning a map and dodging traffic.

My trip, a pleasant cross-cultural sampler, zigzagged between Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, and French Canada. The U.S. segments combined the history of big-city Boston with the small-town Americana of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and the whale-watching joy of Bar Harbor, Maine. In Canada, I enjoyed the cobblestone streets of Quebec City and Montreal's sidewalk cafes and artists' easels.

The seven departures of this year's fall foliage fling, roundtrip from Montreal, again features Stockbridge and Quebec City, plus Lake Placid, Albany, and Saratoga Springs, New York.

The American European Express, created in 1989 with 11 refurbished train cars from the 1940s and '50s, had a tangential relationship to the famous continental Orient Express. Alby Gant of Switzerland, who inaugurated the Nostalgie Istanbul Orient Express in 1972, encouraged American entrepreneurs to create a similar deluxe train with historic carriages--voila, the American European Express was born. After several starts and stops in ownership and operation, Henry Hillman bought the company in 1997, changing the name to the American Orient Express (AOE).

It is a grand old way to see our expansive part of the world. The cars have been carefully refurbished and updated while retaining their nostalgia and romance.

On my autumn tour, passenger Anne Weltner of Atlanta has just finished Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train and is diving into the author's most famous rail whodunit, Murder on the Orient Express, over a lunch of gnocchi and wine.

It's the perfect book for the setting, the Chicago Dining Car. Although the Chicago began life in 1959 as a lowly counter diner/lounge, it has been retrofitted in Christie-style luxury with wood paneling, marquetry insets of birds, and faux marbling on the coved ceilings. It's white-linen service and AOE monogramaned china at every meal.

The sleepers, too, look like movie props. My Vintage Pullman is in the Vienna car, built in 1956 by Pullman-Standard for Union Pacific's city train service. It's smaller than my closet at home, but once everything is put away, it's somehow more cozy than claustrophobic. After all, these cars, restored at more than $1 million each, mirrored the sleek style of their era, and the least I can do is try 1Mng streamlined for a week.

But the narrow corridors seem curiously to shrink every day, especially when there's no chance to step off for some purposeful walking. On this train, "Murder on the American Orient Express" may be by calories and cholesterol.

As with the best trains of Europe, it's nearly impossible to imagine how such a tiny galley can yield such good food. But executive chef and former Marine Warren McLeod runs a tight grill, and the four-course lunches and dinners flow out of the miniature kitchen.

With a New England itinerary, there's plenty of seafood, balanced with filet mignon, pork, and veal. Yet even with 93 passengers, special requests become commands to be obeyed.

One evening, I ask for a simple plate of vegetables rather than any of the three entrees. Soon, Chef McLeod himself bounds up the dome car steps to personally deliver a vegetable fritatta he has whipped up for me.

"Oh, you didn't need to do that," I tell him.

"Why wouldn't I?" he asks before arranging the plate just so, then racing back to his Lilliputian domain.

Off the train, the food is just as lavish. After a morning of exploring Boston's Old North Church and Harvard Yard in Cambridge, a welcome luncheon of sauteed lobster and pasta is set amidst the gleaming paneling of Hampshire House on Beacon Hill an elegant townhouse upstairs from Boston's popular Cheers bars. Near the tour's end, Maine's Bar Harbor Inn boils more than 100 lobsters for an old-fashioned Down East feast--served on white linen tablecloths that are soon immaculate no more.

The American Orient Express itinerary balances excursions flavored with a real sense of place against enough travel time onboard for the true rail fans. Guest lecturers, such as Brad Lomazzi, author of Railroad Timetables, Travel Brochures and Posters, ride along and present programs as we move from town to town. Lomazzi offered some perspective on passenger train travel then and now, from the early 1840s carriages through the resurgence of luxury train travel.