Wired‘s Douglas Wolk looks at the Station to Station train tour:
Adam Auxier is Station to Station’s train producer – an energetic, affable guy who just happens to know pretty much everything there is to know about trains and their history. He put together the assortment of gorgeous old train cars that make up the vehicle for Doug Aitken’s coast-to-coast art-and-music tour (and helped Aitken to select the stations where it’s stopping), and he’s been overseeing the train and telling fascinating tales about its provenance and its route.
The cars on the Station to Station train were built between 1916 and 1953; Auxier arranged for them to be chartered from private owners who maintain them as a labor of love and rent them out to offset the cost of keeping them railworthy. (He has contact with all of them through his tour company, Altiplano Rail.) “A car like this seems wonderful,” Auxier says, pointing up at the skylights of the double-decker “Superdome” that serves as the train’s dining car and kitchen, “but it’s 65 years old. Imagine taking a 65-year-old car at 90 miles an hour across Missouri!”
The train’s individual cars all have stories of their own, all of which are at Auxier’s fingertips. “The Mojave, which is the Levi’s car, actually ran on this route, between Chicago and L.A.,” he says. “The Santa Fe Railway was a big promoter of the Southwest as a place for tourism – they did up the interiors of their cars with beautiful Southwestern art and carpet patterns. The lounge car up at the front was built for the president of the Norfolk & Western railroad in 1916, and it’s basically the private jet of its era. It was a mobile office, so an executive of that time would put it on a scheduled passenger train and take along a chef – he’d have a bedroom, an office and a kitchen for himself. It allowed him to go to any point on the railroad and conduct business.”
