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The Eastern & Oriental Express
by DANA DE ZOYSA

They are the world's great trains, and there are only six of them: The Royal Scotsman from London to Edinburgh, the Venice-Simplon Express whose great-great grandaddy first rolled out in 1833, the Blue Train in South Africa that's a 1,000-mile-long five-star hotel running between Cape Town and Johannesburg, India's Train of the Maharajas on which waiters delivering meals on catwalks outside the cars because there are no through doors between kitchen and diner, the Tren a las Nubas in Argentina that ascends so high into the Andes you can drink the tea as it still boils, the Indian-to-Pacific across Australia, the Anna Kerenina between Moscow and Saint Pete (as locals lovingly call their recently de-Leninized grad or "city"). Sadly, you can no longer include the original Mombasa to Nairobi Express with wooden sleeper cars that has its own legend - a lion once jumped through a window to drag out a corpulent colonial as he was devouring a corpulent steak. Today you'll have to ride it via Out of Africa on your VCR. That leaves only five. What about the newcomer to this group, still smelling of paint and wood, the Eastern & Oriental that runs 1,207 miles in 42 hours between Singapore and Bangkok?

Anything interesting in this new fancy string of varnish for Passenger Train Journal's "old rails" you can spot immediately on a passenger run because they don't lurch along with the car?

The Eastern & Oriental Express! What a name! It conjures images of being greeted by a turbaned Sikh amid the equatorial heat and "Welcome, sir!" that mixes exotically with Singapore's Keppel Station's spicy Hindu and Chinese dishes and iced coffee in the lunch room and squeaky, singsong music from radios that sounds like someone strangling a violin.

The E&O management provides a coffee-table brochure so lush and descriptive it will one day end up in collectibles' magazine with eyebrow-lifting price tags. But for now their blurbs about Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Bangkok take back seat to what they have to say about the E&O cars lined up in front of you as you walk through Keppel's mini-customs booth to the fancy string of varnish ahead.

It took three years to get the E&O from idea to tracks. In 1987 the board chairman of Orient-Express Hotels, James Sherwood, along with his wife, the authoress Dr. Shirley Sherwood, were traveling the Singapore-to-Bangkok railway line. They'd earlier been through Europe with the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express in 1982 and immediately realized the Singapore-to-Bangkok run had all the ingredients of a Great Train routing - famed cities, lush countryside, wildly diverse faces and scenes, jungles, hazy shimmering lakes, towering thunderheads, sunsets that turn novelists into a theasaurus.

However, dreams are one thing, reality another. Until E&O there was no single-journey train connection between Malaysia and Thailand. Passengers had to change trains at Butterworth station inland from Penang island. There was no history of privately owned rolling stock running on public rails in the region - the state railways owned both the stock and the rails it rolled on. The decision to break this tradition went so high it wasn't finally settled until politicians and bureaucrats agreed on a special cabinet resolution in Thailand.

Moreover, the Malaysia government railroad, Keratapi Transpot Malaysia, (Keratapi mean "fire wagon" in Malay) and State Railway of Thailand had never needed third-party haulage contracts. These had not merely to be negotiated, but invented first. The rail gauges differed by a seemingly miniscule amount - 1 meter exactly to 1.067 meters, a shy difference of merely 6.7 millimeters, less than a third of an inch. But unless truck widths were rationalized the wheels would howl like a banshee and spend large portions of their lives in the shop being reflanged. Train operating procedures had to be reconciled between the Malaysian system in which stationmasters have authority over all train operations in their blocks, and Thailand where dispatchers rule the rails.

Not simple, but doable. So they did it. The E&O's management company, Venice Simplon-Orient-Express Ltd. (named after the fact its personnel had similarly restored the famous European train), purchased 24 stainless steel-bodied railway carriages originally built in 1972 by Nippon Sharyo and Hitachi of Japan and operated as the Silver Star in New Zealand but which were now gathering cobwebs after a NZR system-wide equipment upgrade.

E&O settled on four basic carriage platforms: single and double berth sleeping, dining, and generator cars. The owners' feasibility studies projected a high-season (October through February) full-house of 130 passengers per run and low-season average of about 60. Hence they configured a full high-season train of 6 standard sleepers with 6 compartments each, 7 state sleepers of 4 compartments each, a presidential car with 2 suites) 2 restaurant cars, a bar car, the observation car, 2 service cars for the onboard staff of 67, and 2 power cars.

The basic carriages were basically very high quality but had a lot of miles on them. The carriages were stripped to their bare shells by they were still in New Zealand. The brakes were completely overhauled and wheels regauged to 1 meter and machined to a mid-range profile between the Malaysian B8 and Thai B12 standard. This means little curve chattering (especially on the line's almost wholly ribbonrail track) but more frequent trips to the shop to remachine flange wear.

Although both the Malaysian GM 2200 and 2400 series and Thai XX locomotives have coupler heights of 0.85 meter, the NZR carriages didn't. The entire coupler housings had to be demounted from the frames and remachined to fit. In the unlikely event E&O ever sells them, they'll now roll most anywhere in Southeast Asia.

By July 1991 the heavy engineering was done and the bare metal shells were shipped to E&O's newly constructed workshop near Singapore's Keppel Road station. (Passenger Train Journal readers interested in the details of Southeast Asian car and loco maintenance are welcome to visit the Keppel shops; request through E&O's office in Singapore.)

Under the floorboards the brake and water pipes, and electrical and aircon wiring were completely replaced and in some cases redesigned. Although NZR's Silver Star had been air-conditioned, their capacity was woefully inadequate for the 70°F to 95°F daily temperatures and 60 to 100 percent humidities of the South China Sea / Bay of Bengal climatic regime. The Sigma company of Australia designed a custom aircon system overspec'd 10 percent beyond the worst-case condition of 95°F in a driving monsoon - not an entirely farfetched pair of numbers in this region.

The future train's two generator cars had to produce 415V AC at 50Hz. Each car's original dual power units were replaced with MacAlister electricals driven by Cummins V-19 diesels. Now the generator spec plate reads 352 kV, 440V, and 300 amp cables running at 1,200 rpm.

This being a high-load train with back-to-back 42-hour runs turned around in six hours, fuel refuels were planned for Butterworth and Bangkok. However, in Bangkok fuel cleanliness can be a problem as it comes straight from barrels. Hence E&O specified two large inlet filters leading from filler pipe to the under-unit's 3000 liter tanks, two filters between these mains and the above-floor holding tank, and two more filters into the injector reservoir, all in series.

The result is a lot more juice going down the line than the original cables were ever intended for, so the entire undercarriage cabling and connectors were replaced with Gooders units of New Zealand.

Above the floor line, all-new electrics, plumbing (toilets and showers were added to each compartment), ductwork, comm cables, and other functions were done over by Singaporean subcontractors.

Brakes were brought up to the same level of standard. The Japanese railway brake philosophy is individual cylinders at each of the four axles bleeding off a single pressure pipe. Respec'd, the new system used Nippon air brakes driven by a Westinghouse controls (a thought that would delight Mickey Kantor). Since outside conditions can sometimes be exotic by North American standards (kids play swing and villagers dry their clothes on the brake pipes while the E&O sits on the single-track line's sidings waiting for a see-saw pass, and water buffalo and elephants have been hitched to stopcock handles), every moving part was shielded and nozzle levers placed inside padlocked housings.

Topside, the sleeping car windows were moved to accommodate new compartment layouts. Each standard compartment has one window, while the state compartments have two. The dining and presidential cars have longer windows for panoramic views. All the windows are tripled-glazed with an interior-controlled Venetian blind tightly fitted in between the glass panels so they won't clatter during the run.

All this adds weight, and with triple-pane windowpaning and with 3000 liters of water in the service cars and 1500 in the coaches, the E&O's engineers knew shocks would be a major replacement item. These and other routine maintenance jobs are done at E&O's private maintenance shed in the KTMB (Malaysian Railways System) shops in Kuala Lumpur.

Above the waistline, the E&O cars were turned into a fancy string varnish indeed. The mixed-style Eurasian interior decor was conceptualized by the Paris decorator Gerard Gallet and implemented by James Park Associates in London - the same team that restored the E&O company's sister line, the Venice-Simplon "Orient Express" immortalized by Agatha Christie.

The carriage interiors were based on much more than refined nostalgia. The E&O was conceived from the outset to be a unique event that attracts people with unique character. A mere period movie put on on a set of wheels would not do. What, they asked themselves, is the difference between a good show and a great film? The answer to that could transform the merely good train into the Great Train.

The psychology of today's Great Trains is more than nostalgia, more than a luxury version of the Greyhound Therapy subculture that the writer Paul Theroux footnoted during his train rides. Travel for escape or nostalgia alone is like throwing away a raw diamond because it looks like a piece of quartz. The people who ride the E&O and the other Great Trains are neither the fish of dewy-eyed yesteryear buffs nor the fowl of been-there-done-that notch-carvers. Instead they celebrate unforgettable character and unforgettable events. They know how, no matter what their body age, to unite mental youth with new people and new places and new things. It's not what they've seen or what they've done that charts their demeanor, but who they've become in the process. They join confidence and discernment and experience into a sense for personal style almost perfectly captured in the 1932 film Shanghai Express starring Marlene Dietrich.

Hers was a film not a movie, a performance not an act. It set the challenge for the E&O's interior design team. As they leafed through the pages of the symbolic decors of the past, they settled on the exquisite diamond-shaped marquetry paneling from that film. The result is that when passengers step up from the platform to the coach, they step up to the level of the woodcrafter, the artist, the weaver, the tillers of the ground of experience. To wildly overparaphrase Judy Garland's line from the Wizard of Oz, "I don't think we're in Injection-Molded Plastic any more."

The warm colors of the wood paneling lavished upon the interior surfaces come from elm, cherry, teak, and rosewood. The diamond-shaped marquetry was cut by hand, as were the various inlays and emblems that reflect diverse motifs from Asian cultures.

The challenge to the woodcrafters was marquetry that would look opulent yet be easy to repair and remove for access to concealed water pipe, aircon ducts, and electricals. As if that wasn't enough, the walls also had to absorb heat expansion and contraction, plus the torsions of flexing body sides. The high/low range of the E&O's climate envelope expands and contracts each car 25 mm (1 inch). Hence each interior panel had to be designed with a built-in 12.5mm flex zone. Moreover, their subpanels had to absorb impact by crumpling slowly in predefined zones instead of storing collision energy until the entire structure rends in a catastrophic crunch. Hence the coaches were fabricated using a stud-based panel design edge-and-corner-bonded by concealed interlocking movement and expansion joints. The decorative panels which the eye so happily glides over are independently attached with brackets, making them easy to remove.

The exterior paint had to be tested for shade and wearability. The body sides of the white-roofed carriages were painted in British Racing Green with a beige stripe, brass lettering and the E&O leaping tiger crest. Each carriage has a three-digit number. In keeping with Chinese beliefs, certain numbers - 4 (signifying death), 5 (signifying negative), and 7 (signifying erratic) - are avoided. Instead lucky combinations of 2, 3, 6, 8, and 9 were used.

(Superstition also pervaded the construction site where the cars were being refurbished. One day a Chinese worker fancied he saw the ghost of a woman dressed in white. Chinese take this particular image as a lucky omen. He and his coworkers set up a small shrines and daily offered up fruit, beer, and burning incense in the hope that the White Lady of the Rail Yard would bring them good luck in the lottery!)

Riding the E&O

No one recalls whether the worker won any lotteries, but passengers certainly win as they climb aboard at Keppel Station. Customs is a breeze - something of a miracle in rule-obsessed Singapore - but then, it is assumed that if you can afford the E&O you aren't much of a candidate for a drug bust. The cheerful Thai attendants welcome you in any one of six languages while the stationmaster in his all-white notch-collar suit waits on the platform holding red and green flags on short sticks. When the green flag goes up, the Malaysian Railways engineer (locally called "engine driver") slips the twin GMs into Transition One. The slack was taken out while they were reprovisioning from the prior run, so when the green goes down, you're rolling.

The man to find on the E&O if you're an old rail is Mr. Kandasamy Putaran, the on-board "carriage engineer" (localese for conductor). His blue uniform identifies him by his nickname Mr. Gopal. His father was a Singaporean of Hindu Indian descent, his mother Malay. He is a gold mine of facts for people who know and love railroading.

He points out that, while the E&O in principle has priority over other trains, under Malaysian rules a stationmaster has absolute authority over all trains in his block. This comes from the days of no radio and iffy telegraph lines that could suddenly go dead in one of the region's downpours that are really less like rain and more like a vertical flood.

Stationmasters can stop any train to let another pass. Train controllers (dispatchers) have no say in the matter - even in organized-to-the-teeth Singapore. Since some train blocks are over forty miles long and are not yet fully signalized, occasionally a train gets "lost" - it is known to have departed, hasn't arrived, and no one knows where it is. In the old days they used to send someone out on a motorcycle to find it, but now they use cellular phones. None of this, of course, appears in the rule book.

For anyone raised on the now virtually extinct U.S. system of engineers and conductors scooping in wee little half-ounce train orders strung from bamboo Y-frames, the Asian system comes as a shock. The stationmaster folds his orders (handwritten on any spare sheet of paper with no carbons!) into a spindle which is insterted into an inch-diameter steel ball with a quarter-inch hole through it. This ball is also handy for throwing down messages to track supervisors, signalmen, gandy crews, "and," Mr. Gopal confides primly, "sometimes girlfriends."

The ball and its orders are snapped into a leather pouch attached to a bamboo hoop about fifteen inches in diameter. The whole affair weighs about 2½ pounds and is looped down or up on the fly into the waiting arm of the engine driver or someone standing on the platform. It looks like something dreamed up in liability-lawyer heaven, but then, Asian trains rarely go over 35 mph.

The Thais are more strict about the rules. Dispatchers have block authority, which relegates stationmasters to paper pushers and loaders of mail wagons. Mr. Gopal is a trove of the gaffes that can overtake even the most crisply-run railway. Once the E&O was stuck 10 hours in a flood and had to refuel from the farm tractors of nearby residents; it took weeks to finally flush the lines clean. Another time a brake pipe burst and he simply hacksawed a length from an irrigation standpipe and sleeved it over the broken seam. "At least it was clean inside," he grins, "which was a step up from the tractors." Then there are the monkeys who once got into a passenger's compartment that was left accidentally open and stole - of all things - his Q-tips. "I've always had this image of monkeys leaping from tree to tree with one paw while swabbing their ears out with the other." If you think life as the conductor on a luxury train is a life of preplanned perfection, have a chat with Mr. Gopal.

Once aboard you are escorted to your sleeping compartment. Its interiors are paneled with diamond-patterned cherry wood and elm burr decorated with marquetry friezes in the sleepers and with intricately designed inlays in the state compartments and presidential suites. Elm hardwood is used for the skirtings and cornices. The delicate embroidery work on the valences hiding the curtain rungs were done in Malaysia based on Chinese motifs. The carpets are from original designs and were hand-tufted in Thailand. drapes with tasseled tie-backs, blossoms in a vase, brass table lamp. A basket of fresh fruit is replaced every day. The broad double-glazed windows are spotless. The compact bathroom has a tiny marble sink, a flush toilet and a shower just big enough - alas - for one.

The saloon car (whose name derives from the French salon, meaning "chamber for discourse") has a traditional Chinese tone conveyed by dark rosewood and richly colored upholstery. It crams quite a bit into one car - a library, small dining room, and the E&O's boutique that features collectible items for your reminiscence box, plus some of the most attractive and exotic E&O-themed postcards in the world.

At the end of the train, the observation car platform has a wind-in-your-hair colonial verandah feel. It is a popular place. An ever-changing cast of wind-buffeted sightseers visits, all ages, many nationalities, all giddily experiencing the journey of a lifetime. Inside there is a bar with Indonesian teakwood flooring, hardwood panels fitted with woven rattan matting on the walls, rattan furniture, and potted plants. Your final glimpse of Singapore is a long series of grubby, trash-bedecked, abandoned-autoed, urchin-filled apartment blocks which the downtown tourist bureau maintains does not exist. As Singapore's untidy side recedes into the distance, a balding, bespectacled gent who amply fills a tiny-checked vest has quietly entered the car. He's carrying an accordion. He loops the strap over his shoulder and plays. Suddenly it's Napoli.

Tapping with both feet in white socks and black shoes, beige pants, brown-and-black hounds-tooth vest with a silver buckle in back, red bow tie, black garter on his right arm, he looks like he should be named Guiseppe. It turns out his surname is a distinctly British Royston, family name Minjoot. He's a Eurasian of mixed Portuguese/Chinese ancestry who originated in Macau and came to Singapore by way of Malacca. If all this sounds exotic as he relates it between strains of Come Back to Sorrento and SantaLucia, just wait. It turns out Royston was trained as a medical technician - electrocardiography to be precise - but returned to his childhood's love of music. "Being the accordianist on the Eastern & Oriental is much less greasy than EKG's," he observes with a wry smile.

He happens to the only professional accordianist in all of Southeast Asia, "which has the dubious virtue of requiring I have to do 'Name That Tune' with six-hundred tunes. 'The Girl From Ipenema' is my personal favorite, but I don't tell my wife that. She's from Singapore."

As if this morsel of the E&O's exotic feast weren't enough, the Minjoots were married in the Armenian Orthodox Church on Singapore's Hill Street which haven't seen any full-blooded Armenian worshippers for three decades. Apparently Royston fit perfectly into the image the E&O's early management was trying to develop - he was recruited by General Manager Tom Evers Swindell. Rightly done, too, for Royston's music is like the nearly forgotten odor of a former love's favorite rose that brings back memories so clear it's as if their vase has never been empty.

His backstreets-Genoa squeezebox dwindles away as you leave for dinner, first seating at 6:15 sharp. Malaysia looms in the dusk - houses on stilts, smoky backyard fires, vegetable patches, laundry drying, heavy horned buffalo whose horn shapes inspired the unique meningkabau roof gables sweeping to pinnacles at each end. Towering cumulus clouds blacken the distant hills while westward lies a magenta sky of watercolor daubs.

There are two dining cars. The larger Siam features elm panels and lightwood design inlays, starched white linen, shining flatware, polished crystal, orchids - real orchids - on every table (indeed, every flower on the train is a fresh orchid). The Singapura takes its inspiration from Chinese decorative work and features rosewood and lacquered panels hand painted with delicate flowers. The distinctive china was designed by Ginori in Italy. The silver tableware is by Orfeverie Chambly in France. The crystal glasses are Speiglau from Germany and acquire a lush beadwork of condensation when filled with water. The art on the walls is the kind you really look at. The dining table begs a longer gaze but is no less interesting: restrained Chinese lamps with gold tassles and red shades, fresh fuschia orchids, lead-weighted salt and pepper shakers, seven-piece table settings, mute red and gold curtains with braided tiebacks, woven bamboo ceilings, orange chrysanthemum carpet designs, upholstery that features songbirds singing in dark love-knot reds and gunmetal blue.

Chef Kevin Cape starts you off with a humoresque of crab and orange with melon balls, and butter for the bread whetted with a leaf of fresh cilantro. Outside a shack blurs by in the silvered look of windweathered wood. Houses pink and purple with dusk. Shopfront names like Hup Erk Hardware, Tan Soo Kedai Kopi (Coffee Shop), Nambalayam Weddings, Ban Ko Fertilizers and Fine Watches (!), Fong San Collapsible Irrigation Hose, S. Geetha Enterprises, Taufik's Funerals, Nagaraja Kedai Emas (Royal Cobra Gold Shop). Gandy cars. Tie piles. Rain-riven hills. Myriad reflections of yourself in the double thermopane windows as night creeps in on cat's paws. You wonder if it's all part of the stagecraft of E&O's plot to immerse you in your own period movie.

Chef Kevin Cape discreetly interrupts to inquire about the lemon grass garnish on a bowl of Thai chicken-and-prawn soup with a broth of coconut milk. You glimpse one of the waiters gracefully replacing a napkin that's slipped from a passenger's lap with a new one while another waiter whisks away the old. E&O's staff is confident enough of their guests' acumen with thin but vividly hued Thai soups they don't put a placemat under the bowl. Kevin is member of one of the world's smallest professional confraternities: the eight chefs of the world's Great Trains. "What turned me to trains?" he pretends to ponder, since he's heard that query at least a thousand times. "Madness! Sheer madness! Moving, jostling, choosing potatoes, mixing spices, France, Malta, USA, London's West End, brought here to set up the E&O. Always put vanilla in the milk! Four a.m. in the Penang bazaar bartering for eggs for a Prime Minister's soufflé. Washing dishes in Perrier when we run out of water. Lesson: you don't run out ever. How can you not love trains!?"

Once 20 liters of orange juice bought in Bangkok soured halfway down the Kra peninsula where Myanmar (Burma) lies over the ridge. "Cellphoned up a friend at the Pan Pacific Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, John Russman, who loaded twenty fresh liters into a Mercedes stretch limo and drove them to Penang." Clearly Kevin is a chef not to be underestimated. From him the flow of conversation is more like a torrent, so it's best to just float along as best you can:

"Buy the morning of the run at the Central Market in Singapore, on the return in Bangkok, veggies, fruit, two bags. Beef from the U.S. is best, no pork because of the Muslims. Menu changes every four months, totally new each time, we can't be as flexible as a hotel. Then again, don't have to. Computer-generated shopping list based on the number of passengers, checklist of standard items. At 6 a.m. breakfast begins. I'm on at seven doing lunch preps. At 7:30 a meeting with the boys to go over special diets, VIP menus. Begin the soup bases. No precooking or vacuum packs. Everything is fresh, all cooking convection and conduction, some steam. Lunch at noon, two cooks, two kitchens. Then the sauces, garnishes, sealing the meat and fish, cutting the fruits, start baking the breads. Hour break in the afternoon. Gets inspirations looking out the windows. Not married, my career is my wife. Hobby is cookery books, occasional articles for food magazines and food industry publications. Nothing in the food world is totally original, everyone copies a little, creates a little. The trick is in things like translating local spices into European tastes - getting a satay taste when you don't have the right peanut butter. Originally wanted to be a flight technician, loved airplanes, but discovered I could replicate recipes like a musician with perfect pitch can do Mozart. Someone suggested catering, chance threw me this job. Have to be imperturbable as Gibraltar on this job. Once a freezer broke down and it was 96 degrees out there. I screamed. Then I did tai chi and everything was fine."

He really talks like this! Kevin isn't one of Paul Theroux's fantasies on an overheard sentence fragment. Central Casting couldn't have done better. After Kevin's quick-cut style, the rest of dinner resembles an Elizabethan state progress from appetizer through post-prandials. Then to the bar car where tuxedos appear, sparkly cocktail dresses, whiffs of expensive perfume. The car's paneling theme of blond ashwood reflected in mirrors etched with exquisite Buddhist lotus-flower designs, a fitting accompaniment to the unaccessoried dresses of wealthy Chinese and the silk kimonos worn by grandmothers from Japan. The oriental flavor is accentuated by the detailwork carvings of the bar counter, wall sconces, embroidered silk valences in dark red and muted silver-and-gold.

As William, the E&O's Singapore-born Malayan pianist plays Thai and Malay love songs, you enter into yet another of the surreal worlds the E&O was intended to be: sipping French white wine or Scotch single malts in a Thai-inspired bar car made in Japan and remade in Singapore while outside the windows blurs past some nameless, raspy, sweaty, insufferably overmotorscootered, plantation burg in the rubber-tree forests of Malaysia. The E&O bar car after dinner is living refutation of the theory that you can sense only one thing at a time, think only one thought at a time.