Train travel is so expensive these days, but £25,000? For that you get a couple of nights stay on board, with double bed, bathroom, sitting room, views down the track as it recedes into the distance and a rear balcony should you come over all Harry S. Truman.
This is the master bedroom on The Chairman’s Train, puffing into action in July as the UK’s first fully private heritage train for hire. And yes, for £45,000 – a day – you and your 15 guests can have the whole thing, its dining carriage and many comfy rooms pulled by the locomotive of your choice, electric, diesel or steam. Steam certainly isn’t its only throwback either – with its wood paneling, leather armchairs and marble sinks, bar, pianist, chef and a dozen uniformed staff, mobile phones, sneakers and first name terms all start to seem like painfully incongruous intrusions from another, less refined time.
But that, one suspects, is precisely what Jeremy Hosking is aiming at: the good old days of strong tea and pink maps set on tracks, a reminder of what train travel used to be, even for the less well-heeled. This was when whistle and smoke, compartments and waiting rooms – replete with possibility – gave it a certain very British kind of dowdy glamour. Hosking – rich list habitué, heavyweight political donor and shameless train nerd, being the man behind the Locomotive Services, which operates rail tours using heritage trains and which for the last decade has saved a significant part of the UK’s rail heritage – may have a point too.
As prices fall and access increases, it’s perhaps the destiny of all forms of mass transit to lose their initial allure – just look at how dressing up for Concorde and the 747’s upstairs bar became a packet of mini pretzels and a touch of deep vein thrombosis. But maybe, for the few at least, with the Hosking Express there’s a chance to go back in time to when everyone was spritzed with a touch of the mysterious just by dint of being on a train with something as exotic as seats for everyone, even if – thanks to our pop cultural conditioning – it all might feel a little like travelling in a mobile Agatha Christie theme park.
Hosking – the Fat Wallet Controller – doesn’t expect it to make a profit. With the carriages costing a million plus to restore, and most steam engines comfortably upwards of £5m, he says this venture is economically disastrous. Who cares? Here is a man who finds himself with the best, and certainly the most well-appointed, train set. He’s never going to have to use busy textiles to hide dubious stains, explain to his passengers that the delayed train is still awaiting its driver, or enjoy the cool touch of a fully-loaded metal loo, à la Belmarsh. There’s a brass plate at the foot of each carriage door that reads simply ‘private train’. And it beats private plane travel any day.
But his rose-tinting only goes so far. Train travel offers the kind of peace and contemplation that only mobility – and, importantly, a linear, evenly paced kind of mobility – provides. A meandering car ride leaves the passenger too close to the surroundings to take a more holistic let alone romantic view, or perhaps too distracted by poor driving. The view from a train, on the other hand, is cinematic, prompting momentary musings about other people’s lives, as Larkin identified in The Whitsun Weddings with its ‘frail travelling coincidence’.
With the carriages costing a million plus to restore Hosking says this venture is economically disastrous
The Euston to Crewe line, with its vista of empty football pitches, pylons, faceless warehousing and even the industrial infrastructure of an electrified railway, rarely offers this. Sadly, the surroundings The Chairman’s Train runs through are mostly not as accurately period in feel as its interior. No wonder Hosking seems keen to get his train to the West Coast of Scotland asap. His is a train on which to get as far away as possible from other trains. Remarkably, he has wrestled the bureaucrats and won the right operating licence to take it almost anywhere in the UK – down the remotest and most overlooked of branch lines – so there’s hope.
Hosking knows that this venture doesn’t really belong in this world, with maybe only a few of the Gulfstream class able to afford it set to appreciate its deeper meaning, its inescapable sense of what’s been lost. He calls the project completely nostalgic. Yet there’s also a strong hint of make believe to it all, as his naming of sleeper rooms after children’s books suggests – the likes of Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, but, alas, no Thomas The Tank Engine. It’s not just the overhead lines that need suspending. So does disbelief. But as long as you don’t look through the windows too often, this is a train journey just waiting for a delicious murder, ideally of a pretty but unpleasant heiress, with a moustachioed man from Belgium – or the Bay Area – on hand to finally gather everyone in the dining car. Here, again, is a train you don’t mind taking its time to reach its destination.
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