A busy rail hub in northwest England feels like an unlikely portal to the golden age of train travel. Pendolinos, when not grounded by rail strikes, lurch and sway at nauseating speed, the countryside passing in a blur. Heady with the fragrance of blocked toilets, they offer weary travellers the meagre comforts of palate-scalding tea and sad, overpriced sandwiches. Yet, just across the tracks from where these crowded conduits spill out hoi polloi, the UK’s only privately owned train exudes the glamorous air of a bygone era. The Chairman’s Set, as it is known – a procession of repurposed former Caledonian Sleeper coaches in classic 1950s British Rail ‘blood and custard’ livery – is designed to be enjoyed.
Sara Oliver, the interior designer who, along with the engineers and technicians at Independent Rail, has realised this vision, describes her client as a ‘rail enthusiast’. He already owned several locomotives by the time the pair first discussed the project in late 2017. His motivation for adding sleeper carriages was to facilitate extended trips to the most beautiful tracks in Britain, many of which run through remote parts of Scotland. Oliver’s first glimpse of the rolling stock that was to be her raw material was in 2019 at a disused iron works in Weardale, County Durham. The long-serving coaches were singularly uninspiring: ‘sticky purple carpets infused with spilt stew and surrounded by chrome and laminate’. Back at the yard, Independent Rail gutted the coaches, creating a near-cylindrical blank canvas on which Oliver’s ideas began to take shape.
Part of the singular thrill of such a project was the paucity of precedents. ‘There were no references,’ as Oliver puts it. Famously, the royal family have a train – although, since the carriages are owned by DB Cargo, it’s not technically private. The royal train was the first thing Oliver Googled when she received the commission, ‘but it’s a lot of 1970s Formica and avocado bathrooms’. Nor did the client’s brief offer much in the way of guidance: his one stipulation was ‘please make sure that everything is tomato-soup proof’. Inspiration instead came from films – from Some Like It Hot to Murder on the Orient Express; notes from her son, who had conveniently just honeymooned on the Andean Explorer; and extensive research into trains around the world. Oliver’s pièce de résistance, a glass door with a juliet balcony at the end of the master bedroom, the last carriage in the set, drew from a Japanese train design, while the wooden panelling throughout replicated a section of Lutyens original that her daughter had stored in her barn.
The interiors, as it turned out, had to be resistant to more than just tomato soup. For official approval, every single fabric had to be rigorously fire-tested (‘we literally had to pay for a company to burn beautiful Guy Goodfellow and Robert Kime fabrics to see how long they took to smoulder or burst into flames’). The G-force applications for all the objects had to be calculated, with furniture being fixed to minimise potential dangers in the event of an accident. There were other technical considerations. How to create a shower tray that prevents water spilling over the edge when the train tilts to one side? How to install a bronze McKinney & Co curtain pole into a curved metal ceiling? Even where items stood up to safety scrutiny, other effects of motion had to be taken into account. (An initial vision of opening the curtains with black Deco-style bamboo rods was abandoned when it was pointed out they would jangle annoyingly while the train was idling.) Oliver spent the first six months of the project drawing up the budget, itemising each object and material to be scrutinised by the operating company, Locomotive Services.
The rigour paid off. The resulting suite of ‘rooms’ manages to be both stately and comfortable, with large squishy sofas (built in situ), luxurious soft furnishings (created with the expert help of Emma O’Hea) and gentle lighting. The main bedroom contains a super-king-sized bed, while the guest coach provides two mini-suites, each composed of a room-sized double bed, en suite and connecting dressing area, designed with considerable ingenuity to maximise space. In fact, throughout, there is a feeling of space in spite of the carriages’ compact dimensions. Antiques and adornments have been judiciously selected, with a few impactful pieces in each coach, among them a sculpture of a monkey supporting a bowl, now transformed into an upholstered stool; a gorgeous 1940s drinks trolley; and a pair of ebonised 1960s console tables. It all feels minutely considered, context-appropriate and understatedly luxurious – a design achievement heightened by the fact that the team pulled off the refit amid the first Covid lockdown, working to an immovable deadline as suppliers temporarily shuttered around them. (Since the train runs on the same tracks as those used by every other operating company, taking it out is a serious – and expensive – logistical feat and must be organised several months in advance. Its maiden voyage, to the Kyle of Lochalsh in late September 2020, could not be rescheduled.)
In keeping with great rail tradition, the main wall decoration throughout is a series of exquisite marquetry panels made by the mother–daughter team at A. Dunn & Son in Chelmsford, Essex, whose family business has been adorning ships and trains since the first golden age of travel. Several of the panels depict scenes from favourite nursery rhymes, but Oliver’s pick – ‘probably my favourite piece that I have ever commissioned’ – is the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ in the drawing room. Inspired by the Duke of Urbino’s studiolo, a masterwork of 15th-century intarsia now in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the lattice-work doors in the trompe-l’oeil design open to reveal, as well as the looped order of the garter, quill case and scopetta (small brush) that appear in the original, a model locomotive and two books: Boris Dänzer-Kantof’s Full Steam Ahead and one whose spine is adorned with Albert Einstein’s field equation for general relativity.
Trains played a singular role in Einstein’s thought experiments, used first to theorise and then to communicate relativity, allowing him to explain such revolutionary notions as time dilation – the fact that time slows as perceived by one observer compared with another, depending on their relative motion. Fitting, then, that The Chairman’s Train should perform an act of time travel all of its own.
The Chairman’s Train will be available to privately charter. For more information, email enquiries@locomotiveservices.co.uk. To contact Sara Oliver visit www.studio-nomad.net
A version of this article appears in the August 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
