I have attended hotel industry conferences in Madrid and Vienna in the past few weeks. The first concentrated on hotel markets bordering the Atlantic Ocean from Iceland to Argentina and from South Africa to Norway. The other concentrated on Central and Eastern Europe, from Germany in the north to Albania in the southeast.
The hotels where I stayed for the conferences were both comfortable and welcoming.
In Madrid, I stayed at the H10 Tribeca on Calle de Pedro Teixeira, two blocks from the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu, newly overhauled and the home of soccer powerhouse Real Madrid. It was my first time staying with the H10 hotel brand.
Meanwhile, in Vienna, I stayed at the Novotel Wien Hauptbahnhof. This was my fourth time booking a Novotel — the other three being the Novotel Athenes in Athens; Novotel Brussels Center Toure Noire; and Novotel Nice Centre in Nice, France.
Both my recent hotels had at least one thing in common — their corridors displayed posters of trains.
The one in Madrid only gained my notice because it was showing a train or train type called the Baltimore + Ohio 0-4-0 Switcher, and Hotel News Now's main office is in Cleveland, Ohio. The poster featured technical drawings of the steam train and its engines and two sepia photographs.
Novotel's poster could be more easily explained, I think, as the brand’s parent company Accor will soon launch the next chapter in the famed story of Orient-Express Trains. According to the poster, this legendary pan-European service traveled daily from London to Vienna, which might be a better reason for having it up on a Viennese hotel wall.
Additional trains traveled between Paris and Bucharest on Thursdays and Sundays and between Paris and Istanbul — named Constantinople in the poster, which featured a skyline depiction of the Turkish city — on Wednesdays. That poster was in a more classical, Mitteleuropa style and featured far more insight than the one referencing Ohio.
Back when the Orient-Express poster was designed — which was the winter season 1888-89 — the entire itinerary could be reached without the need for a passport.
The train service debuted on Oct. 4, 1883, and it will begin afresh via Accor in 2025, although the French company starts a sibling service, Orient Express La Dolce Vita, later this year that will wind through Italy.
I must admit I thought the Baltimore + Ohio 0-4-0 Switcher train was a made-up fancy of a technical artist.
But I was wrong. They did exist, although nothing explained why there was a poster of one of them in a hotel in Madrid.
According to steamlocomotive.com, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Co., the first U.S. railroad firm, built three classes of locomotive: Class C-6, Class York and Class Andrew Jackson. It was headquartered in Medina, Ohio, which is just down the road from Cleveland and where I once had a coffee and sandwich at a spot called Cool Beans on its main square.
Hoteliers might be interested to note that I and countless other guests do look at your posters, although they do not necessarily have to be of trains.
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