When the quarter-mile of vintage luxury known as the American Orient Express pulled into the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad yard in Hermon on Friday, I went aboard to take a look at how the other half is living these days.

The other half – in this case, the 96 passengers who paid $3,000 and up to gaze at the autumn beauty of New England and Quebec for a few days – had been shuttled down to Bar Harbor to wine and dine and look for whales. When they returned in the evening, they would climb back aboard their swanky hotel on wheels and continue along a route that begins in Boston, winds through the Berkshires, then travels to Quebec City and Montreal before making its way back through Vermont and New Hampshire to Boston. With the passengers gone, the 46-member crew busily cleaned and polished and restocked the 15 1940s- and ’50s-era Pullman cars, restored at a cost of $1 million each into what is billed as North America’s only private luxury train.

“This is totally unique,” said Doug Blackmore, the train’s general manager, who walked me through opulent surroundings meant to evoke the long-gone golden age of rail travel. This is not your typical crowded Amtrak train, in other words. “This is the romance of the rails.”

The train’s rather convoluted history began in 1972, when a Swiss named Alby Glatt, who had inaugurated the Nostalgia Istanbul Orient Express in Zurich, decided to operate a similar luxury train in America. Called the American European Express at the time, the train ran into financial difficulty in 1991 when it struck the flatbed trailer of a truck stalled on the tracks, which derailed the locomotive and seven of the 11 passenger cars. Two years later, the operation folded. Reincarnated as the American Oriental Express in 1994, the train passed through different owners until it was purchased in 1997 by Henry Hillman, a venture capitalist of the wealthy Pittsburgh steel family. His mission was to give passengers “all the advantages of a cruise ship” as they toured the country from coast to coast.

“This is the nicest train in the United States,” Blackmore said, as we stepped into the lounge car. “They’ve spared no expense.”

In the center of the car was a Baldwin baby grand piano, at which musicians entertain their cocktail-sipping guests throughout the evening. The chairs are expensively plush, and the walls of the cars are covered with embossed French leather, Honduran mahogany and gleaming brass fixtures, giving the entire train the feel of an elegant private social club. In the dining car, where the meals are prepared by gourmet chefs and the fine wine flows freely, the tables shimmer with silver and imported glassware and china. Passengers, pampered by porters throughout their trips, stroll to the dome car or their wood-paneled cabins at night on hand-loomed carpets from England. A mere $10,000, Blackmore said, gets you a private stateroom, with a shower, 24-hour porter service, and passage on all the train’s several routes across the United States and Canada.

“Most of our passengers are fairly well-heeled retirees, and we do get a lot of train buffs,” said Blackmore, as we wrapped up our brief tour. “Our passengers tend to be adventurous, gregarious and easygoing types who enjoy the social aspect of train travel. There are no TVs, and no video games, so it’s really a chance for people to escape for a while and see the country at a leisurely pace that’s hard to find in other forms of travel. Which means it’s too quiet for kids.”