You can pay Amtrak to haul your train car around[0], so you’ve just got to figure out a way to get the car from Switzerland to the US, and then you can really get around in style.
gauge is likely easy to change. Not cheap, but Amtrak demands expensive inspections and refurbishment to run, so the cost of changing the gauge is likely fairly small compared to the other costs.
This is actually quite a significant technical achievement - for example, a similar project in Japan failed.
Japanese Railways wanted to build a train that can run at full speed (~300 km/h) on the standard gauge (1435 mm) regular Shinkansen lines but also use the narrow gauge (1067 mm) existing lines at slower speed. Those older lines would not have to be rebuilt for the Shinkansen standard & there would still be significant time savings:
This failed to produce a viable train, resulting in falling back to track rebuilds or using relay trains that connect directly from Shinkansen to the local rail line on the same platform.
I wonder if the slower-speed lines have looser tolerances.
Then maybe running the gauge-change train on the slower lines might kill the train's tolerances before it moves back to the super smooth high-speed lines.
There's a station on the main line that loads full sized cars with tanks on them onto little bougies that take them up into the mountains for training.
No, it isn't easy to change at all. Not unless the car was specifically designed for it, and not nearly that much of a jump. The ones that exist in real life are almost all for switching between Russian (5ft) and Standard (4ft 8.5in) gauges.
To be eligible to run as part of an Amtrak train any car must past all FRA rules/guidelines, which a Euro-spec car absolutely will not without hundreds of thousands of dollars of work.
It would be MUCH cheaper to start with a car already in the US and meeting those standards. Much, much cheaper. Still not cheap, but in the realm of the practical.
Yeah some overnight trains can adjust their gauge on the France/Spain border.
On the China/Mongolia border on the other hand they disassemble the train, lift the train cars up one by one (with passengers inside), switch out the boogies and then reassemble. 3 hour process, you can fully sleep through it and not notice.
On a night train such as the Transsib that takes several days to get from A to B anyway, being able to sleep through it and not needing to lug your stuff around is usually considered more important.
(Although in some cases you are woken up for border formalities.)
> (Although in some cases you are woken up for border formalities.)
Yeah although you can just stay in bed for this. I've been on the train. The Chinese officials just wake you up, stamp your passport, and off you go to sleep.
Then the Mongolian officials came on, asked me a couple questions to see whether I respected their country, why I was going there, grumbled something unintelligble, stamped my passport and moved on.
Much better than getting in line for 2 hours if you ask me (which is what happened at the Bulgaria/Turkey border and the Georgia/Armenia border when I crossed those)
It’s possible in The Netherlands to charter a private train. I have seen large companies do this for a company retreat. It’s not even that expensive. I remember it being €5000/hour which isn’t a bad way to move 300 employees to the other side of the country.
All European railway operators are legally required to offer this, by the way: it's an open market, so (provided there is physical space) they have to allow anyone to run their own train. Normally this means freight trains, but it also means companies like FlixTrain can attempt to compete with the large national train operators - and of course it allows for one-off charters.
The only downside is that preference is given to regularly scheduled services, and the remaining space is first-come-first-serve, so on the busier routes there's a decent chance you'll have to take a large detour instead, or sit in a siding waiting for a while.
The infrastructure operators have to allow anyone with a train operating license on their tracks, and such license is very nontrivial to acquire.
Usually you would hire a train from a train operating company, and those companies are not required to rent out their trains - although several have been set up explicitly with that goal, of course.
There are clubs[1][2] of owners, and they'll generally rent them out to people. We looked into doing it for my bachelor party. Unfortunately, the cost is akin to renting a yacht for the same amount of time (On the order of thousands per day, minimum), so we quickly shelved that plan for an AirBnB.
I don't have personal experience, but I've heard it's not viable. The biggest issue is that Amtrak offers the service on a "best effort" basis, which means that if the train you want to hook up to is running late (which this frequently are due to conflicts with cargo traffic), they won't hook your car up, and you have to wait for the next train, which also might not be able to hook you up.
There are a few clubs that have cars that do this for a club outing. Members pay a small amount of dues, but the largest cost is labor - you are expected to help rebuild their cars. Most of the club money seems to come from renting the cars out.
The above is what I gather from reading their websites. However there is no club close enough to me for joining to be reasonable and so I didn't verify the above.
Somewhere, the locomotove nomads travel the wastes of North America in their reinforced rail cars. They never speak to one another, but sometimes you can glimpse the deisel smoke of a distant train on the horizon at sunset…
[0]: https://www.amtrak.com/privately-owned-rail-cars