In the heart of the most wonderful NYC neighbourhood – Greenwich Village – it has rooms inspired by vintage train cabins and a history of sheltering Titanic survivors.
The industry has opted for level two of the European Rail Traffic Management System, which uses radio waves to connect signals to computers in train cabins.
The "cabins" resemble train cabins of old, and each comes equipped with power outlets, USB sockets and free Wi-Fi.
Reminiscent of a high-class train cabin, it was tiny: all of 50 square feet, just big enough for a custom-made twin bed and a shelf.
But the train cabin itself might feel familiar — the ideal space for a writer, like a carrel in a college library.
The other is the defibrillator: 'Most long-haul airlines carry them and train cabin staff to use them.' And most in-flight incidents are, thankfully, minor.
Going our way meant sharing bread and cheese with kindly Russians in a shared train cabin, and drinking beers with Australian jackaroos (we'd call them cowboys) at a lonely desert roadhouse.
BACK in 2000 I shared a train cabin from Amsterdam to Munich with an Afghan man who, when he learned I was a journalist, pleaded with me to communicate to the American public that the CIA had to stop destroying his country and rebuild it instead.
Airlines are required to train cabin crew in first aid, but in practice, according to the BMA, 'there are few requirements or guidelines on the standards that have to be achieved, either in the training programmes or for the crew completing the courses'.
In some films, the exotic locations of our romantic imaginings are used like the cheap trick of a pink lightbulb, to add a glow to an ordinary love story: the incidental geography that throws Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart together on a steamboat in "The African Queen" or lands Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in the same European train cabin in "Before Sunrise".
I've been through a large selection of phases—I've jerked into socks while watching anime, I've done it in groups, in a train cabin, on speed, with a fever, in chatrooms, next to unknowing bedmates, and to naked pictures of a 1990s Demi Moore.
