Luxury train won't leave station

Put off those plans to head to Tibet in a luxury train.

Looks like the “five-star tourist train” that was supposed to begin this month, ferrying tourists from Beijing to Tibet in special luxury, is not to be, at least not yet.

The Shanghai Daily this morning carries a Xinhua story that says the plan has been put off indefinitely.

Tickets for the 96-passenger, 15-car train were to cost 20 times the normal train ticket price to Lhasa, that is to say, more than an air ticket.

But then passengers would get 20-square-meter suites with double beds. Each train would also have a special sightseeing wagon with big windows and comfortable chairs.

Of course, one can still take the regular passenger train to Lhasa, which is quite comfortable. I took it once from Lanzhou in Gansu Province all the way to Lhasa. That train service was inaugurated in July 2006 and was the most expensive railway to construct in the world because of the difficulty of building track across permafrost

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The train's cars probably got Shanghaied to a more profitable route.

[peter]

Traveling overnight to Beijing on the train, I discovered the bottom bunk beds were unoccupied. The train had no more scheduled stops.

Rather than sleep in the top-bunk I roped down to the vacant bottom bunk.

The roaming stewardess was distessed to see this, and pushing a blinking flashlight in my face, told me to re-ascend.

It was a nonsensical decision to make. Unfortunately she reinforced her decision by screaming into her walki-talki for the back-up brigade.

My entire cabin was woken up by the walki-talki device. This was not the worst: the walki-talki was so loud that it activated the trains optical-sound lighting mechanism: Floodlight city for all!

You could hear the groans!