The Antidote to Amtrak: The Napa Valley Wine Train - Page 3

The Champaign Vista Dome

No matter what they burn, the FPA-4s pull a small fleet of passenger cars, which includes an ex-Milwaukee Road Railroad Line Vista Dome car built in 1947. The dome car had seen over a million miles of railroad use, prior to its purchase by the NVWT. It was first put in service on the Wine Train in June of 1997.

The car was rebuilt through a joint effort of, interestingly enough, the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus train Repair Yard in Florida, who did the exterior, and the NVWT, who restored, updated, and customized the interior of the car for its own use.

The dome car was redesigned by the railroad to allow dining in the upper level, and cocktail service on the first level, where there is also a kitchen that sends meals up to the dome via a dumbwaiter. Unlike travelers in most of the cars, who spend half the trip in a conventional coach, outfitted as a lounge, and then are asked to move to a diner for their meal, passengers in the dome car, named "Champagne Vista" spend their entire meal seated in the one car.

Plush Pullmans Massively Retrofitted

The 1947 Vista Dome car is one of the newer members of the Wine Train's passenger fleet. Eight of the cars are 1915 Pullmans, lavishly restored with air-conditioned, and deep, plush interiors. These cars were originally built for the Northern Pacific Railroad, then acquired by the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad in 1960, where they were used to transport skiers to resorts surrounding Denver. The Wine Train purchased them in 1987, part of their first acquisitions of rolling stock.

The NVWT has made massive upgrades to the cars. Lou Schulyer says, "They were nothing but scrap cars when we got them, you know. We made the observation cars ourselves. We put in the toilets, and the four inches of concrete in the floor, and Honduras mahogany, and draperies, and air conditioning. We didn't think we had to put new roofs on them, but we did."

There's four inches of concrete in the floors? "Oh yeah--helps stabilize the ride," Schulyer says. "See, we run at a slow speed here, and at a slow speed, you will pick up indenture in the track. And the cars have a tendency to rock at a low speed, where if you were going at a higher speed, they wouldn't."

To design the interiors of the cars, The NVWT brought in Norman Roth, a San Francisco-based designer, with 35 years of experience, including projects in Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Spain and Italy to create the Pullman's interiors. He says he was inspired to create an "elegance and sophistication of the 1920's and 1930's" after researching Europe's Venice-Simplon Orient Express and the Andalusian Express, which traverses southern Spain.

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

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