January 25th, 2025 – I am modifying this page for a moment because I bought a model American Orient Express train set, but when it arrived, the main 2 items in the set were BADLY BROKEN! I am using the page that I had already started writing about the real American Orient Express trains to make it easy for the seller and eBay to see what I saw when I opened the set I bought.
I ordered the set on January 4th, 2025, 4 days after I started creating this article that appear below the horizontal line. My order number is 16-122531-16212. The package was delivered to me on January 21st along with 2 other packages (by different carriers I think). I wasn’t home most of the day. I opened the other packages first starting late in the evening. I was just about to go to bed around 3:45ish in the morning when I thought I should probably go ahead and open the RIVAROSSI Walthers HO DCC/DUAL SOUND American Orient Express 8X Lighted Car Set from ScaleTrains4Less who is located in Greece. That way, I could try to leave him some feedback quickly as it might be several days after that before I could get to the trains again. So, I began taking the brown cellophane tape off the out box. There was a lot of it. After getting the tape off the outside box, I pulled the inside box out and put it on top of the outside box. The inside box was pretty snug in there. The outside box is a 2-corrugated layer box that is only 1/8″ thick total. The box has some dents in it too. I haven’t taken a picture of the box yet, because the inside box is still on top of it, but sometime tomorrow, I will take photos of the outside box and add them to the photos here. One last thing about the outside box: The box is turned inside-out and appears to be a retail box for something called “Comfee Split …”. I don’t believe this was a good choice for shipping the train set.
The inside box was wrapped with about 1 layer (maybe 2) of thin bubble wrap. The box and its contents also smell heavily of some strong smoke odors. I suspect it is cigar smoke. it permeates my house now since I have left the items unopened in the state I left them in after unpacking them. But more on that later. Let’s get to that point first.
As I took the bubble wrap off the outside of the inside box, which is nothing more than very thin cardboard cover about the thickness of cereal box cardboard over the top of a Styrofoam carton, I put it in a plastic bag. I typically tend to save plastic wrap to recycle and reuse later, but because it stunk of some sort of tobacco smoke, I bagged it up to throw it away. Underneath the bubble wrap was a thin clear layer of plastic. I do not think it is the original sealed plastic. I think it is plastic sheeting that came from something else that the seller placed around the retail box. I put that in the bag for trash too. Then, I lifted the top retail cardboard cover off the trains. The cardboard cover is the original Rivarossi decorative cover that has the golden circular seal on it printed with the numbers 2888 / 3000, indicating this is the 2888th set out of 3000 that Rivarossi manufactured. I set the top cover out of the way.
I looked down at the set and immediately, I could see that there was something horribly wrong. The 2 locomotives are positioned in the first row of the Styrofoam. Although not touching at the time, it appeared that the 2 locomotives apparently collided together rear-end to rear-end. The locomotives are among some of the heaviest Diesel locomotives made by Life-Like (which was sold to Walthers). The seller listed that he had replaced the original Rivarossi locomotives with 2 DCC Sound Equipped Walthers (Life-Like Proto 2000) diesel engines. I don’t know WHEN this happened, but to give the seller the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume it happened during shipping. Unfortunately, he didn’t pack the items well enough to sustain the international trip from Greece to the United States. So, I am publishing this page to document the situation and help present the information to both the seller and eBay.
I grabbed my phone and started taking pictures and videos of what I saw when I opened the retail box and as I started lifting the locomotives and cars out of the box. eBay’s only allows about 5 pictures to be sent when bringing this to their attention and I don’t think they allow videos at all. Although the Grecian seller appears to communicate in English very well, the videos will be more helpful than the pictures, I think.
At this point, the damages to the locomotives render the set unusable as none of the couplers on the locomotives survived, and the wiring inside of one locomotive looks like some of it came apart. I might be able to repair the wiring after I put some time and effort into figuring out where the wires should go. But I bought what I was told was a fully functioning train set. But what arrived is a BROKEN CATASTROPHE and a non-working train set. The Rivarossi shells on the locomotives are beyond repair. They will have to be repurchased. So, I need to see what the seller is willing to do and what recourse I via eBay to recover my invested losses in this set. I hold the seller responsible for inadequately packing the set to survive the journey from Greece to America.
As far as I can tell thus far, only 1 passenger car was negatively affected: The Monte Carlo passenger car has a small split on one side just above the stirrup. This can be seen in the photos that I took.
Hopefully, we can resolve this issue amicably. As of right now, I definitely didn’t receive my money’s worth, and I cannot operate the trains without performing some major repairs and purchasing another set of the locomotives.
Below are all the photos from the sellers original eBay listing showing the train set in great shape.
January 1, 2025, about 20 minutes until 7 PM ET, I performed a search for the American Orient Express train. I found a video published by what appears to me to be a European man, probably located somewhere in Great Brittain. He told about a train that approximately two weeks earlier, I didn’t know existed. The name of the train at one time was called the American Orient Express train. It had a couple other names too. The video was written, edited, and narrated by Ruairidh MacVeigh. YouTube stated the video was published a month earlier. I am presenting his video here without asking his permission. Hopefully he will be okay with that. I encourage you to watch the video and like it on YouTube if you appreciate it. I feel Mr. MacVeigh did an excellent job covering the American Orient Express train.
I first learned of the existence of this train by seeing a model appear in an unrelated search around the 17th of December. I saved the resulting search to revisit later. I did that today and decided to determine if a real American Orient Express ever existed. To my surprise, it did. Watch the video an learn what it was all about and what became of the American Orient Express.
American Orient Express – Last Stand of American Luxury. Nov 16, 2024 — Ruairidh MacVeigh
When I asked Google search the following question: “was there ever an american orient express passenger train or service?” Google’s AI search engine responded with the following:
AI Overview (Learn more)
Yes, the American Orient Express (AOE) was a luxury passenger train that operated in North America from 1989 to 2008:
- History: The AOE was formerly known as the American European Express (AEE). The first run of the AEE was on November 15, 1989. The service was based in Seattle, Washington.
- Features: The AOE offered a glamorous and opulent experience, including:
- Lounge cars named BAY POINT and ST. MORITZ
- Diner cars named CHICAGO and ZURICH
- Sleeper cars named BERLIN, ISTANBUL, MONTE CARLO, PARIS, VIENNA, and WASHINGTON
- Classically trained service staff
- Route: The AOE operated on routes throughout North America.
- Reception: Ridership never took off, and the service was reduced to three times weekly in May 1990. The AOE was the final hurrah for the classic American railroad passenger experience.
- Fate of the cars: Some of the AOE cars were stored in Atlanta and occasionally ran on the New Georgia Railroad tourist excursions. Six cars went to Grand Canyon Railway as part of Philip Anschutz’s purchase.
Wikipedia Article – American Orient Express – Wikipedia. [I removed the following 2 sentences.] Wikipedia article opening paragraph excerpt (bolded): American Orient Express, formerly the American European Express, operated a single luxury passenger train set in charter service between 1989 and 2008 and operated on routes throughout North America. The company was based in Seattle, Washington.
- [The AI excerpted a portion of the transcript of the video (Bolded). I copied the beginning and the ending of the excerpt from the YouTube transcript and applied appropriately here:] {However,} While the market remained strong, the business case of the service was swept out from under it by the impact of the 2008 Global Economic recession, with the demand for luxury travel in all sectors plummeting, and passenger reservations aboard the train drying up completely, the final trip of what was once the American Orient Express being conducted on August 28th, 2008, when it returned to Tacoma, Washington, while parent company, Colorado Railcar, would also go out of business during the same year due to its primary income being based on investments in tourist railways and other such ventures. Following the end of the service in 2008, many of the former coaches were sold off for scrap, placed into storage or preserved, while as of 2024, although various proposals have been mooted as to a potential revival of the scheme, a continued weakness in the luxury travel market, combined with a lack of capacity on America’s primary railroads due to the ever increasing demands of freight, mean the business case for this possible operation would garner, at best, very narrow profit margins, and thus be unable to justify the amount of capital needed to bring the concept to fruition in a sustainable. manner Nevertheless the American Orient Express and its various incarnations, proved to be the final hurrah for the classic American railroad passenger experience, delivering to the discerning passenger the glamour and opulence of what was once the golden era of the railway, as per the 1940s and 50s, presenting luxuries and service that was far beyond what was being provided by the mainstream passenger rail operator, while at the same time introducing tourists to some of the most beautiful scenery and culture in the continental United States….
Ruairidh MacVeigh (Transcript by YouTube).
Theme Trains. [The AI excerpted a portion of text from ThemeTrains.com. Like above, I copied the incomplete phrase to finish the statement AI was trying to make. The statement included links to other pages on ThemeTrains.com. See my comments below as well. (I did not bold the excerpted portion this time because of the links incorporated into the website’s text.)] [From] The 1989 – 2009 American-European Express – ThemeTrains.com. The AEE service was offered six times a week. The cars were lounges BAY POINT and ST. MORITZ, diners CHICAGO and ZURICH, and sleepers BERLIN, ISTANBUL, MONTE CARLO, PARIS, VIENNA, and WASHINGTON.
The first run of the AEE came November 15, 1989. Ridership never quite took off and the service was reduced to three times weekly in May 1990, but twice a week the AEE cars began traveling to New York behind the Broadway Limited, another Amtrak train. The last trip in this iteration of the AEE was in November 1990, to make room for a new concept for the train.
[AI presented an excerpt from Theme Trains with a link as well. I followed it and found that Todd Schannuth of Accuen Media did a wonderful job of presenting a huge amount of information about the American Orient Express train on ThemeTrains.com. Check it out.]
Generative AI is experimental.
