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Transportation The Almighty Buck

$350 Million 'Palace On Rails' Luxury Train Concept Unveiled (cnn.com) 164

Posted by BeauHD from the palace-on-rails dept.
French designer Thierry Gaugain, known for his impressive yacht designs, including Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' 80-meter vessel Venus, is conceptualizing a $350 million luxury train "envisioned for one unique owner," says Gaugain. CNN reports: Described as a luxurious "palace on rails," the 400-meter long train will be made of 14 cars and glass so technologically advanced that it can switch from opaque to complete transparency. Gaugain feels that travel has become more focused on speed than the actual journey, and he sees the G Train as a mode of transportation where those on board can have just as much, if not more, fun on the way to their chosen destination. "Travel is not about speed," he says. "It's about taking the time, because time is the only treasure we have."

And it's not just the exterior of the train that can be transformed at the flick of a switch, passengers can also change "the interior ambiance of the train in whichever section they are." If they want to ensure the outdoor surroundings, they can switch to transparent mode, but if they want to create their own views, they can change the glass to opaque and create pretty much any view they want. "The train is a stage," explains Gaugain. "You can change the light, the season or the pace in order to change your relationship to time." He has yet to find a customer and admits he may need to find "someone as crazy" as himself to buy the train. It will likely be at a cost of around $350 million and the project will take at least two and a half years to build.

With space for around 18 overnight guests, the G Train is set to run at 160 kilometers per hour and will be adapted to run on railways across the Americas and Europe. The G Train can be split into two if those onboard decide they want to go off in different directions. Passengers enter via the welcome hall at the center of the train, which leads to its main residential area that includes the owner's accommodation and entertainment space, as well as an area for special guests, a social room, as well as Grand Salon that's specifically designed for receptions. Guests will also have access to a "secret" garden, while the wings of the train can be folded down to devise alfresco terraces, where parties can be held, or even onboard concerts.
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$350 Million 'Palace On Rails' Luxury Train Concept Unveiled More

$350 Million 'Palace On Rails' Luxury Train Concept Unveiled

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  • Who would buy it? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @02:03AM (#61568691)

    Trains are inherently extremely limited in where they can go, and when and how fast they can make those trips. Unlike yachts, which are the ultimate sign of freedom, as you can go to almost any port at your own leisure. Or just hang in the middle of nowhere fishing, diving and so on.

    So why would you get a train instead? It makes no sense to get it over a much more freedom-enabling things like a large bus or an airplane for overland leisure travel.

    • Vladmir Putin!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Russia already has multiple state leadership trains for nuclear war scenario if I remember correctly.

        About the only state leader I can think of that may actually need a new luxury train is the current Kim.

    • ...you can go to almost any port at your own leisure so why would you get a train instead?

      Um, how does a yacht hold a party in the middle of Moscow? Or Paris?

      PS: Where does the "instead" come from? People can have both.

      (several of each in fact - one for each continent so they don't have to slum it in hotels while they're waiting for the yacht/train to arrive)

      • Um, how does a yacht hold a party in the middle of Moscow? Or Paris?

        London? Steam under Tower Bridge and moor up alongside the HMS Belfast. Won't be cheap, but more than doable, and I don't think any superyachts are larger than a cruiser. You see things moored there every now and again, sometimes foreign warships, the odd cruise ship and a superyacht or two. Well you did in the before times anyway.

        The main problem is that you are technically moored on the south side of the river, a place the richest of the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        >Um, how does a yacht hold a party in the middle of Moscow? Or Paris?

        Seine and Moscow river. How do you do that on a train?

        The "drive deep inland" thing is about using a bus. Just ask exceedingly rich touring bands.

      • Um, how does a yacht hold a party in the middle of Moscow? Or Paris?
        Paris: you sail up the Seine, and then you can either dock in one of the many channels or in the Marina at the Bastille.
        Moscow:
        a) you sail into the Wolga - Baltic channel, obviously from the Baltic sea
        b) you sail into the Wolga - Don channel via the Mediterranean sea, Black sea, then Caspic sea
        and go up river till Okra and then upriver till Moskwa, then follow till Moscow.

        There should be a channel system accessible from the northern polar s

      • Um, how does a yacht hold a party in the middle of Moscow? Or Paris?

        I mean if you want to take short limited trips then more power to you. If I were a billionaire, getting to a shitty city on the same slab of rock I am already at sounds boring as batshit. Paris? Yuk. I'll moore off the coast of a Greek Island thanks, or if France is a requirement then Nice or more likely if you have stupid money Monaco. Moscow? WTF would you go to Moscow when you could go to St Petersburg instead. But more likely I'd take my Yacht off this crappy continent and head down to a pacific island.

      • learjet : The yacht of the sky. This is how with your "yacht" you are everywhere.

        • I'm reading The Demon-Haunted World right now. Good book!

          You can have way better parties on a well-equipped train. The point isn't to "go somewhere", but to have kind of an epic road trip without the driving part.
          The emaciated versions that Amtrak here in the US runs are sad things. Look at Via in Canada for some nice trains, as well as beautiful scenery. It doesn't take a US$350 million train set to create awesome journeys, just some creative thinking on the part of those who run the passenger trains. Befo

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by inicom ( 81356 )

        A large percentage of my customers are Superyacht owners, and here's how they have a party on their yacht in the middle of Moscow, or Paris, or Monaco, or wherever.

        Picks up phone. "Tell the captain I want to have a party on the 21st in Moscow". Hangs up.
        Picks up phone again. "Have the pilot arrange to pick me up in the Hamptons on the 19th and be fueled for a direct flight to Moscow. Use the Learjet".

        Mission accomplished.

        How the yacht gets to Moscow is immaterial. It is might be sent via yacht express or s

    • Trains are inherently extremely limited in where they can go, and when and how fast they can make those trips. Unlike yachts, which are the ultimate sign of freedom, as you can go to almost any port at your own leisure. Or just hang in the middle of nowhere fishing, diving and so on.

      So why would you get a train instead? It makes no sense to get it over a much more freedom-enabling things like a large bus or an airplane for overland leisure travel.

      The obvious answer is that you probably already have a yacht or two and you want to travel to the plenty of places that your yacht can't go in a level of style that no car or plane can ever provide. If you travel from the Louver in Paris to The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, there is no form of transport which comes close to a train in terms of speed. Not even an helicopter. As ever, you choose the right tool for the right job.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        That is already done, as there are extremely rich bands that have to tour deep inland. They use private aviation and tour busses. They do not use trains, because unlike private aviation, they're slow and extremely limited in places they can actually access and their timetables, and unlike busses, in addition to all aforementioned issues they also can't be just parked where they need to be parked at the time.

        • I just can't pass this opportunity up.

          The lead singer of Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson, got tired of the road life and got himself qualified as a commercial pilot. He cut his hair and stayed clean-shaven. He flew some charter flights; one anecdote from the time is that he was in his uniform and was approached by some guy who was wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt, and he thought "oh, this will be a long one" - until the guy asked him where the bathroom was. He had just met the former lead singer of the band and

          • Based on that picture, I sometimes wondered if Iron Maiden timed their tour stops with when World leaders were going to have their planes at certain airports. Several years ago, a friend of a friend took a picture of Bruce at O'hare, complete in captains jacket coming down the stairway of Ed Force One. One of the other 747's at O'hare during that time? Air Force One.

      • "Trains are inherently extremely limited in where they can go, and when and how fast they can make those trips. Unlike yachts, "

        Yes, I'm always bored when I board the TGV from Luxembourg to Paris with only 320km/h (2h5min) while my yacht is much faster (3 days) there over the Moselle and channels.

    • Trains are inherently extremely limited in where they can go, and when and how fast they can make those trips. Unlike yachts, which are the ultimate sign of freedom, as you can go to almost any port at your own leisure

      ...are you saying that yachts are faster than trains? Also, are you saying that there's more ports in the world than railway stations?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Private aviation is a thing and yes, in many cases yacht will be faster because time slots on long range rail are very difficult to get without reserving them long in advance. In many cases, impossible.

        • "Private aviation is a thing"

          In my small hometown of 20.000 people we lost 13 people in 5 crashes in the last 20 years.
          It's a deadly thing when piloted by people with only a few dozen flight-hours per year.

        • What has private aviation have to do with yachts?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            Subject: luxury travel. Things mentioned in OP: yachts, busses and planes.

            Or did you stop reading at the first paragraph?

      • Also, are you saying that there's more ports in the world than railway stations?
        There are most likely more places with a port than railway stations.
        And keep in mind: not every yacht is a 100m long helicopter platform destroyer where the guns are missing.
        Plenty of yachts can simply anchor 100m away from the coast line, or as a catamaran or trimaran, simply beach the first yard of the boat on a nice sand beach.

        • My country has around one train stop per 4000 people or something like that. If this were an average, it would mean that you had to have two million ports in the world, or, given that the global coastal length is around 1.16 million km (obviously estimating the length of the coast is a famously complex problem, but let's treat it as a first order estimate), you'd need one port every 580 meters or so. Is that realistic to you? OK, so maybe not all countries are as densely connected with railways as mine. Let

    • Yet I know people who took the trans Siberian rail road from somewhere in Germany down to Mongolia.
      A train that barely goes 100km/h an hour.

      So why would you get a train instead?
      Because some people enjoy trains. (Never read an SF were trains were the "main thing"?)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Tell me, how do you go about getting a rail slot on Trans-Siberian railway for your nice private train? How much in advance do you need to reserve it? How long do you take to get all permits in order? How nice is it to prepare the train, get all the correct wheels for each phase of the trip?

        Because let me guess. You for a moment assumed that private trains going for a single trip is the same as any other train on those lines, because private buses can use the same roads as buses from large companies, and pr

        • The person who can afford a $350m 'palace on rails' probably has staff to deal with these things. Also, money has historically been found to be quite helping in cutting through red tape.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            I don't think you quite understand how rail works. Money can give you access to resources that exist. It cannot magically conjure them out of the ether.

            That's why rich buy yachts, planes and busses for their luxury travel, not trains. In case of yachts, planes and busses, resources to utilize them easily exist universally and are merely money gated. In case of rail, resources either do not exist, or they are severely time gated with no hope of money removing that problem.

        • But if you spend just a few seconds thinking about it, you'll realise that trains do not work that way.
          No one claimed that.

          And if you had thought about a few things as well, you would know that this:
          and private planes can use same airfields as national carriers.
          is simply plain wrong. You should replace "can" with "could".

          And bottom line: it is not that hard to get a slot on a railway system. Probably not for a high speed main route if your train is a leisure train (e.g. Karlsruhe - Strasbourg - Paris), bu

      • "Yet I know people who took the trans Siberian rail road from somewhere in Germany down to Mongolia.
        A train that barely goes 100km/h an hour."

        There are only 5 yachts on the planet who can read that speed.

        • Good point. :D

          You know the saying we sailors have:
          When I'm rich enough, I can afford such a yacht!!
          But I will never be rich enough to afford the crew, fuel, maintenance and harbouring fees.

          We once where in Antibes. A fine yacht (relatively, as it was a motor yacht, no true sailor would buy such a ting) was laying in the harbour, in front of the cafe we where sitting. So we made some guestimated back of the envelope calculations about the running costs.

          We came to something like 40,000 DM (Deutsche Mark), rou

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      If you've never tried it, the thing about a train is that it combines the experience of travel with the comfort of staying at home.

      I used to take the train for business trips that were on the order of 500-1000 miles -- longer than I'd want to drive, but enough to be a PITA by air travel, especially if one (or God forbid) two flight changes were required. The thing I liked about rail travel was that it wasn't downtime, I could have a pleasant working day and if I wanted to I could get up to stretch my leg

    • Trains are inherently extremely limited in where they can go, and when and how fast they can make those trips

      The train is designed to handle European and American rails. So it can be shipped to America when the owner wants to ride a train there.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Scum with too much money they defrauded other out of. Who else? Nobody decent would ever be able to afford such a thing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        So you genuinely believe that there's no way for people to create so much societal value as to be valued that high by other people other than fraud? You can't think of a single way?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      New trains will be different to old trains. New trains will be self propelled AI carriages, using induction to power themselves from the middle induction rail with batteries just in case, that link toegthor for efficiency but drop off onto parallel station tracks. Think of the traffic flow on rails to become more of continuous flow controlled remotely, the monitor every self powered carriage on the track.

      That makes residential carriage parks possible, a station of them, all self contained. Punch in the des

  • "Travel is not about speed," he says. "It's about taking the time, because time is the only treasure we have."

    What?

    • Because "art"

      I failed in art school because I thought it was actually about the art instead of teaching you how to explain how the pretty thing you made is amazing.

    • "Travel is not about speed," he says. "It's about taking the time, because time is the only treasure we have."

      What?

      That was basically Sterling Archer's response when he heard about the 24-hour trip across the Atlantic on board the rigid airship Excelsior [fandom.com] in the episode Skytanic [fandom.com]:

      Captain Lammers: The crossing takes twenty-four hours.
      Archer: Are you joking? What?
      Lammers: Rigid airships combine the pampering of a cruise ship with the speed of —
      Archer: Some other slightly faster ship? [Puts pretend phone to ear] Uh, hello, airplanes? Yeah, it's blimps. You win. Bye

      Of course, then there was all the "Hydrogen" ... :-)

    • His point is roughly that you should enjoy the journey. Enjoy it on a train with 17 models.

  • and only 14 cars?

  • Obviously this is for the distinguished gentleman or lady who would not wince at laying tracks to go wherever they want. Jiust make sure to have enoigh replacement parts...

  • Snowpiercer? (Score:5, Funny)

    by nokarmajustviewspls ( 7441308 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @02:34AM (#61568741)

    I can't be the only person who took one look at the headline and thought of the movie "Snowpiercer"

    Of course they don't make any mention of the dystopian social structure in the train or the (nuclear powered?) engine that gives it the ability to endlessly circle the earth but I'm sure that'll come next. (Actually, in the movie is the train much longer? A hundred or a thousand cars?)

    Anyway, for some reason I associated this with the proposal by the murderer's I mean crown prince of Saudi Arabia's proposal to build a hundreds of km long (train line?) linear city in the desert. Maybe he could hang out with his fellow murderer I mean buddy Putin and go back and forth on this ridiculous train. If they could pick up a certain genocidal scale mass murderer from North Korea as well as one of their orange haired admirers from North America (he mentioned many times how much he envied the power these guys had) well the more the merrier when it derails.

    You could call it "Dunepiercer"

    • I can't be the only person who took one look at the headline and thought of the movie "Snowpiercer"

      Actually, as I grow older and I watch the class inequalities grow wider, and the police states necessary to contain the pent-up anger of the losers grow harsher, I regularly think "Oh... Another dystopian movie coming true."

      Just to put your observation in a more generic light.

    • Just curious, which US presidents wouldn't be allowed on that train?

      • In recent memory, you mean? Jimmy Carter.

        • Yeah, exactly. It's amazing how many liberals think their side isn't also warmongering, murdering, capitalists.

          • Well, I'm liberal AF and I don't consider the bulk of Democrats to be leftists or on my side. They're centrists, and they work for corporate bastards including the MIC and couldn't give two shits about me.

    • You beat me to it. Snowpiercer indeed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by at10u8 ( 179705 )
      Usul has called a big one.

  • would ride on taxpayer-funded infrastructure. I sure hope they'll make the rich operator pay adequately for rights to access the network, wear and tear, and for the disruption on regular public transport traffic.

    For some reason though, I have a feeling it'll be cheaper for them to ride their exclusive gravy train than it is for us cattle to ride regular cattle-class trains compared to our respective levels of income. I don't know why...

  • This is probably a bit of a stretch, but with China pushing their "One Belt One Road" initiative and with the very visible impact of global warming on our environment - think of the hurricanes of the last few years, the temperature records in the North-East recently, the droughts, forest fires and flooding - it may be that use of fossil fuel for transport becomes socially unacceptable before we hit peak oil.

    Especially when you read reports like this [eia.gov] (see figures 8.5 and 8.6 on page 4 of 11) and you reali

  • Let's say this idea makes it off the imagination sheet and can be built to concept while also meeting all of the requirements for passenger car construction, which is doubtful, there are major issues with operation.

    In North America anyways, getting your custom passenger consist scheduled on any of the Class 1 railroads is a challenge. Again, not impossible but challenging. The multi-billionaire owner of the luxury "palace on rails" may not have the patience to sit on an isolated siding in Northern Ontar

    • Shipping the whole train to different nations would be not just expensive, which obviously is not a big impediment for someone who can afford the train in the first place, but also a logistical nightmare. The owner is probably not actually going to ever ship the whole train anywhere, except maybe once for bragging rights. But they may well ship a few cars somewhere more often, to be added to an existing train.

      However, if I were building a train like this... well, I wouldn't, heh. But if I were, I'd want eve

      • RE: shipping ... Concept says it is envisioned running in the Americas

        RE: self propelled:

        You want a Budd Car! Me too!
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • Thanks for that trip down Wikipedia lane, it was enjoyable. Today, assuming the ability to use any rail I wanted, I'd prefer something with a whole crapload of battery and the ability to charge from both third rails and catenary wires, as well as other sources (plenty of room to mount chargers...)

          Alas, most rail is now unusable.

          There's several hybrid light rail options now...

          • Alas, most rail is now unusable.

            If you are talking about North America, do you mean the rail is fully allocated mainly for freight? Or are you referring to the amount of abandoned branch lines? In any case there is little room for any additional traffic. Certainly private ad hoc travel as envisioned by the article is almost impossible. There are some private cars out there that the owners move by contract transport between locations but that is a rarity.

            • Yes, the abandoned branch lines. It is unfortunate that many RoWs lack room for bidirectional rail even if there was the will to build it, because expanding it is unrealistic

      • I'd want every car to be powered independently

        Which is common for trains, and so a quite reasonable design.

  • Used to be more common (Score:3)

    by Casandro ( 751346 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @03:24AM (#61568841)

    Here's a list (with pictures) of the trains only the royals of Bavaria had:
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Here are more photographs:
    https://commons.wikimedia.org/... [wikimedia.org]

  • I say old chum, a palace train is a splendid idea, perchance you might be interested in a 3 million dollar coach with horses also, you can keep them in the back carriage!

  • ... it will never leave the designer board because it is an outlandish and stupid idea meant to garner column inches and nothing else. This happens all the time. A few years back someone was designing a yacht that looked like it had a replica Monaco perched on top of it, another time a giant yacht that was also a submarine. etc. Dumb shit that tabloids lap up because its cheaper than covering actual news.

  • Stupid artist dreams up fantasy train...news at 11?

  • It sounds like they're right; we are living in a new Giled Age [history.com].

  • La Perceuse de Neige!

  • More stupid extravagant useless conspicuous consumption for rich people!

  • Not economical to exist.

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