Luxury train trips

By Douglas Rogers

updated 1:05 p.m. ET Feb. 2, 2007

The Orient Express, founded in 1883, evokes all kinds of opulent images, and with good reason: As it ran routes between Paris, Strasbourg, Vienna and Bucharest, the original hotel-on-tracks became second-home to royalty, celebrities, and fictional murderers. The legacy of rail-car luxury was cemented.

Yet the train's standards declined in the post-WWII years and it finally, uh, ran out of steam in 1977. In fact, the business of luxury trains (and ocean liners) had started to decline in the 1950s, with the advent of air travel. By the 1970s, the entire premise of luxury-rail travel had bottomed out. But just as cruise ships have made a comeback and now resemble five-star hotels at sea, high-end trains are back in vogue as well.

From European Alps to Russian Steppes, Canada's Rockies to Africa's savanna, it's now possible to travel by rail through some of the most beautiful, far-flung parts of earth in the kind of comfort passengers in the 1930s golden age of rail travel could only dream of.

Fittingly, it was the revival of the Orient-Express that triggered this resurgence. Rail enthusiast James Sherwood, Chairman and Founder of Orient-Express Hotels, bought two art deco 1920s Orient-Express carriages at an auction in 1977 and spent $16 million over the next five years restoring them — and 35 other vintage sleepers, Pullmans and restaurant cars he purchased — to magnificent period-era detail.

Renamed the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, Sherwood's train debuted in 1982 (with Liza Minnelli as one of its passengers), and in the 25 years since has proved so popular that overnight jaunts such as London-Venice cost over $3,000, sell out months in advance and are widely hailed as the most romantic rail journeys on earth.

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Other operators have followed close behind. Taj and Palace hotels in India each manage a luxury train on the subcontinent, and entrepreneurs in South Africa and Russia have bought and restored once-abandoned rolling stock and turned them into rolling luxury hotels.

In fact, five-star amenities and mod-cons are now standard on tourist trains. The lavish Deccan Odyssey, which launched in 2004 and travels from Mumbai through coastal Goa and inland Maharashtra, not only has gourmet chefs trained by Taj Hotels, but a conference car with internet access and an Ayurveda spa with a team of masseuses to tend to aches and pains. Not that you should have any, given you're traveling through rural India in a bubble of designer comfort, not on an elephant.

Palace Tours India's Palace on Wheels lets travelers explore the desert forts and lakeside palaces of Rajasthan on a week-long return journey from Delhi, taking in storied cities including Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Udaipur, with the Taj Majal and a tiger sanctuary thrown in for good measure.

In fact, boutiques, gyms, bars and even lecture cars are now standard on many long rail journeys — just as on cruise ships. Tim Littler, British founder of luxury train tour company GW Travel, and owner of the Trans-Siberian Express (which he purchased after the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early '90s), books academics on his three-week Silk Route journeys from Moscow to Beijing to give history lectures en route. "My journeys are land cruises," says Littler. "I saw what cruise ships were doing and did the same."

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