Quirky museum to offer night on Orient Express
‘Guests may not enjoy modern comforts, but have an adventure’
DRACY-SAINT-LOUP, France, July 26, (Agencies): Visitors to a quirky rail museum in France’s Burgundy region, the brainchild of US entrepreneur Gregory Marshall, will have a new opportunity to spend a night on the legendary Orient Express.
Two carriages and a locomotive from the line created in 1883 to carry the well-heeled from Paris to Constantinople, as Istanbul was then called, are the jewel of Marshall’s growing collection of steam trains for a hotel-cummuseum he hopes to open next year.
The Orient Express stopped serving Istanbul in 1977 when the service was shortened and the fabled train made its last journey in December 2009.
Dating from 1948, Marshall’s Orient Express carriages include a luxurious restaurant car — which features a cylinder phonograph among its period highlights — where guests will dine.
Marshall’s “dream train” project is centred on a disused railway station nestled among century-old oaks and aspens in the village of Dracy-Saint-Loup, population 600.
Once he brings the long-deserted station, built in 1882, back to life, “it’ll be great for kids,” said the white-haired Marshall, who looks far younger than his 71 years.
“I’ve loved trains since I was a child,” said Marshall, a former US Marine who remembers the first toy train set his father gave him when he was five or six years old.
“Almost everybody of my age, older, or a little bit younger, has memories of steam locomotives,” Marshall said.
“But in regular museums there’s no participation, people can’t get on (the trains), and really enjoy them, have an adventure.”
The last locomotive to arrive at the site was a Cockerill from Belgium, taking its place beside a huge steam engine dating from 1916.
Marshall’s French manager, Gregory Godessart, says guests cannot expect to enjoy all the modern comforts, but just “to have fun spending the night in the Orient Express.”
So far one of the wagons is practically ready to take paying guests, with Marshall aiming for a spring 2018 opening.
For his own sleeping comfort, Marshall plans a “double-decker” carriage that will be his main residence at the Dracy-Saint-Loup station, which lies on a now defunct line that meanders through Burgundy’s Morvan highlands and has not seen a passenger since 2011.
Marshall, who made a fortune from some telecommunications patents, bought the dilapidated building from the French state railway company SNCF in September 2016.
He knows his “dream train” project is going to bust the 200,000 euro ($230,000) budget he set. But he doesn’t mind. Formerly active with American heritage groups, Marshall hopes his station and its historic rolling stock will earn a historic classification in France. Marshall is not only about steam trains. An avid pilot, he owns a Piper Lance sixseater, which is parked at the airport in the nearby Burgundy capital Dijon.
Before moving to France in 2003, he lived in Boston and Hawaii, as well as California where he was in the celebrated California Highway Patrol.
“Very interesting, very fun, when you’re young, you chase bad guys and arrest them, it’s an adventure,” said Marshall, who was divorced, remarried and is now a widower.
“I’m not happy if I do the same thing for too long,” he said.
Marshall has a collection of Citroen’s emblematic Deux Chevaux (2CV) cars, including one that he has adapted to look like a World War II-era US army vehicle.
One day he hopes to ship over to France the last home of the pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 flew nonstop from New York to Paris, which he dismantled several years ago in order to preserve it.
Dracy-Saint-Loup residents are enthused by Marshall’s project.
Godessart said “a little old lady, 95 years old, who used to take the train with her grandmother” visited the site.
While the “dream train” project slowly takes shape, weeds continue to consume the old tracks and the rickety station platform sags in places.
“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Marshall said.
Also: DES MOINES, Iowa:
The Iowa State Fair will this year celebrate “Little House on the Prairie” with a butter sculpture of author Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The Des Moines Register reports that the dairy likeness of Wilder will be displayed next to the butter cow, which is an annual feature at the fair.
Wilder wrote the “Little House” series about 19th Century homesteaders in the Midwest, and the books formed the basis for the longrunning television show. She spent part of her childhood in Burr Oak, Iowa.
A butter replica of the Solheim Cup golf trophy will also be displayed at the Aug 10-20 event. Previous butter sculptures include Elvis Presley and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
The Iowa State Fair attracts more than a million visitors every year.
ROME:
Visitors to Rome’s Trevi Fountain were on their best behaviour on Tuesday as the city started testing out a plan to clamp down on tourists dipping their feet into the basin of the centuries-old landmark.
A public outcry over inappropriate behaviour at the Italian capital’s monuments prompted the mayor to decree in June that anyone caught paddling in fountains or picnicking on their pedestals could be fined up to 240 euros ($280.44).
Volunteers in police uniform patrolled the crowd around the travertine basin which surrounds the stone rendering of Tritons guiding the shell chariot of water god Oceanus.
“At this initial stage, they are here to help people enjoy the monument when it is at its most crowded, trying to ensure people observe the mayor’s decree,” local police commander Diego Porta told Repubblica TV.
FLORENCE, Italy:
A center dedicated to Italian director Franco Zeffirelli is taking shape in Florence.
The Franco Zeffirelli International Center for the Performing Arts hosted a preview Tuesday of its exhibits, housed in a former Florence courthouse near Palazzo Vecchio.
Some 300 original sketches by the director and more than a dozen costumes used in his operas are displayed. The Inferno Room features a multimedia recreation of Zeffirelli sketches that were inspired by Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”
Music from some of the 94-year-old director’s movies reverberated in the corridors.
COPENHAGEN:
It’s summertime in Denmark but Santas from around the world are already planning for the festive season, with more than 150 gathering in Copenhagen to share some early Christmas cheer.
The annual World Santa Claus Congress, now in its 60th year, has drawn attendees from a dozen countries, most sporting traditional red coats and white beards despite the warmerthan-winter weather.
The three-day event, always held at the Bakken amusement park, will see the Santas parade in the streets of the Danish capital, bathe in the sea and enjoy a herring tasting. Some will also take to the runway at a fashion show.
“We have a discussion about important things in life — for example, which day is Christmas Day?” said Santa Wolfgang from Germany, who has been participating in the congress since 1996.
DUBLIN:
Visitors from mainland Europe in the second quarter accounted for more trips to Ireland than Britons for the first time since quarterly records began nearly two decades ago.
The numbers offset a decline in British tourists brought on in part by the weaker pound since the vote to leave the European Union.
Trips to Ireland grew by 6.6 percent between April and June, official data showed on Wednesday, after two years of double-digit growth ground to a halt in the first quarter with the weak pound keeping visitors from the main market of Britain at home.
The number of tourists from Britain continued to drop at a similar rate in the second quarter, falling 6 percent year-on-year to 950,000 but visitors from the rest of Europe roes by 10 percent to just over 1 million.
When the Central Statistics Office began publishing the data on a quarterly basis in 1999, just 355,000 tourists arrived from mainland Europe over the same period compared with 1 million from neighbouring Britain.
Tourism from the lucrative North American market continued to surge midway through 2017, with the 630,000 visitors in the second quarter representing a 22 percent year-on-year increase from a market where many claim Irish ancestry.