Luxury trains

A luxury train is a hotel that moves, and it is the only hotel a guest cannot change their mind about. There is no walking out for the evening, no other restaurant, no second attempt at anything. What happens at seven in the morning on the second day happens in a corridor a metre wide, to people who will be sitting at breakfast together within the hour.

The journey begins on a platform or in a departure lounge, and that is where the register is set, because it is the last moment a guest is still an ordinary traveller holding a ticket. Boarding is the hinge of the entire product and it is over in four minutes.

And then time is the material. A train is slow on purpose. The service either fills that slowness — a view explained, a stop made interesting, a drink that arrives slightly before it was wanted — or leaves a guest with nothing to do but notice how long this is taking.

• Operators selling two or three days at a rate that competes with a week elsewhere.
• Anyone whose staff cannot step away from guests at any point in the journey.
• Owners who have never boarded their own train as a stranger standing on a platform.

• What boarding did — the platform, the lounge, the first hour aboard.
• How the slow hours were handled, which is most of the journey.
• How close quarters were managed, between guests and between guests and staff.
• What was still being described three days after the final morning.