They’re icons of luxury travel: the Orient-Express, the Queen Mary 2, the private jet. Travel on them and you wave goodbye to the common herd. Sure, they cost a small fortune, but you’ve got to experience them at least once in a lifetime.

Or have you? Are the most prestigious train, boat and plane rides in the world all they’re cracked up to be?

Or, once you’ve blown the cash, will you find that the big beasts of travel are really white elephants in disguise? We sent three writers to find out — to look beyond the caviar, the cocktails and the grovelling flunkeys, and come home with a definitive answer to the burning question: is it really worth it?

The Orient-Express

11AM on a grey November morning, and we were chinking champagne flutes in the gorgeous 1928 carriage of a British Pullman as it crawled out of Victoria. An hour earlier, I had crawled into Victoria on a late, graffitied Connex South Eastern, entertained by the tinny drum’n’bass of a scary bloke’s iPod and half the conversation of a mobiling banker (“Buy, buy, sell, sell, I might lose you in the tunn...”). Now, back through Brixton, Peckham, Sydenham Hill, we were lounging in beautifully upholstered armchairs, sipping fizz, mmming and ahhing over the delicious quail-egg starter, no iPods, no mobiles.

By the time we were out in the Kentish countryside, I’d already forgotten that I was a commoner. No, no, no — I was fin-de-siècle aristocracy, accustomed to servants, bow ties and someone else putting the toothpaste on my toothbrush. Get me another glass of the grand cru, there’s a good fellow. Send a telegram ahead: I shall want my usual table at the Danieli tomorrow. Now, where’s my monocle?

Then we reached Folkestone, got off the train and onto a coach, yes, a coach, for the Eurotunnel transfer: going round Folkestone roundabouts, having to ablute in some ghastly car-park toilet, not having access to a bar... There’s no other way to get us across the Channel — except, God forbid, a ferry — but it was pretty rough, I can tell you.

The fact that the most famous train in the world was waiting for us in Calais kept us going. “Ah, you must be Mr Rudd,” said Steve, an impeccably uniformed steward standing to attention by carriage C. I didn’t really listen to his introductory talk. I was just too excited to be on the Orient-Express. He said something about the locks and how to use the sink, and mentioned the stove he would keep burning for hot water. I pretended to take it all in and be all nonchalant, because that’s what aristos do, isn’t it?

At this point, it is worth noting a few realities. The cabins are small — you have one sofa that converts into two comfortable beds (Steve does that while you’re at dinner), a window and a compact washing cabinet. There is no scope for cat-swinging on the Orient-Express, and the toilet is at the end of the carriage. Other luxury trains have double beds and private showers and televisions, but that’s because they aren’t restorations. They are either modern or modernised. The Orient-Express is neither.

Unless you are addicted to TV, or you have Obsessive Cleaning Disorder, you’ll manage fine. This is luxury like they did it in the old days, when people wrote letters, wore mink at dinner and, after a long train journey to Venice, were a little bit smelly.

My only real concern was the other passengers. I had been expecting quite a lot of mucky brass, some self-made car salesmen and their Burberry-clad wives, even the odd lottery chav. Various princes, earls, dukes, William Hurt, Liza Minnelli and Peter Ustinov have been on board, but so have Anthea Turner, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Vanessa Feltz. It could ruin the whole experience.

Vanessa wasn’t in the bar car when we decided to have a pre-dinner cocktail, and everyone seemed remarkably normal. A few bow ties, a bit OTT, but why not? No overt Burberry, at least. One woman had dressed up as if she’d had a fight with an ostrich in a silver-paint factory, and there was a disproportionately high quotient of age-gap travellers ... he looks old enough to be her great-grandfather, and so forth. Guessing their stories enlivened the drinks and canapés, as did the grand pianist tinkling away melodically, avoiding duff notes despite the bump and grind of the old train suspension — he’s the sort of guy who’d have kept going as the Titanic slipped beneath the waves.

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