Texan envisions well-heeled tourists traveling Maine by luxury rail

PORTLAND – A Texas businessman is offering luxury rail tours in northern Maine this summer, hoping to attract the same sort of well-heeled vacationers who like to sail on cruise ships.

Randy Parten, who owns the nation’s largest fleet of private rail cars, is spending about $3.5 million on the venture, which also includes fall foliage tours from Portland to Montreal.

“We want to bring people to Maine, not the coastal part of Maine everybody knows about, but the big interior part of Maine at Moosehead Lake,” Parten said. He said he has been working on the project for five years.

Parten’s Acadian Railway Co. recently mailed 250,000 brochures to prospective customers and plans to air television and radio ads in major Northeast markets later this month.

The trains are essentially cruise ships on rails, Parten said, with five-course meals and a service staff of about 22 people. Although the train has 540 seats, tours would be limited to no more than 240 people, he said.

The “Arcadian” would consist of 10 rebuilt stainless-steel, streamlined cars from the 1940s and 1950s. The train includes parlor cars, observation cars, dome cars and dining cars, all finished with wood and brass interiors.

The company uses the same vintage cars during the winter for rail tours in Mexico’s Copper Valley region. Greenville would become the centerpiece of the company’s northern tour, the only stop between Montreal and Saint John, New Brunswick.

Passengers on each one-way trip would stay in Greenville for two nights at the Squaw Mountain ski resort and area hotels. There would be two trips a week, from June 9 to Sept. 15.

A three-day tour between Montreal and Portland costs $819 per person double occupancy. A nine-day trip from New York City to Montreal, Greenville, Saint John, Halifax, Bar Harbor, Portland, Boston and back to New York City costs $3,000 per person double occupancy.

Afterward, through Oct. 24, the same trains would run between Montreal and Portland, with a short stop in Bethel.

In northern Maine, the train would use two railroads, the Eastern Maine Railway and the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad. The fall foliage tours would use the St. Lawrence and Atlantic line.

Parten said the Downeaster Amtrak service between Boston and Portland is a crucial component of the company’s plan to create a “circle trip” that uses trains, motor coaches and cruise ships to connect New York City with Maine, the Maritime Provinces and Montreal.

In Greenville, business owners and town officials were excited about the prospect of seeing more than 4,000 wealthy visitors this summer. They said Parten appears quite serious and credible.