King Cotton - No. 1

Riding to City of New Orleans

Rooters Find Fine Routes

January 22, 1986

NEW ORLEANS — Soon this city's hotels will be bulging with Super Bowl revelers, but Floyd Tayloe does not care. He will be traveling to New Orleans inside his own accommodations.

Tayloe will arrive by private rail car, a mahogany-paneled relic of a gentler time that by night will become lodging for the Birmingham, Ala., insurance salesman, along with the chief executive officer of the Columbus and Greenville Railway, four guests, a chef and a porter.

They will spend the Super Bowl week nights parked on tracks in the lesser-used parts of New Orleans' Union Passenger Terminal, several blocks from the Superdome.

If previous experience holds true, Tayloe says, life in the station will be pleasant until the night before their departure, when the car will be moved to a departure track next to the Greyhound Bus terminal and "we get to hear them call out every station stop from here to L.A. all night long."

With seemingly every hotel room here already booked, some sports fans are arriving inside their own accommodations--owners and crews of huge yachts, drivers of recreational vehicles and more private rail car travelers.

Amtrak will store 28 private cars over Super Bowl weekend inside its New Orleans station, including 15 cars owned by the Southern Pacific Transportation Co. and being used by Southern Pacific executives to entertain clients.

A group of Chicago podiatrists will arrive in their own private car. It is called the Silver Foot.

Private rail travel is civilized, says Tayloe. "We use silver, linen, fresh flowers and crystal," he said. He leases the King Cotton car from Columbus & Greenville Railway and has stayed in some of the finest train stations in the nation.

Fittingly, the King Cotton was built by Chicago's Pullman Co. in 1916 and contains a lighted mural depicting Chicago's waterfront. The car was used by the president of the Illinois Central Railroad until Columbus & Greenville acquired some Illinois Central track and the King Cotton.

Designed as a train's final car, the King Cotton has a rear observation platform, an interior observation lounge with sofas and armchairs, three state rooms with baths, a shower, kitchen, dining room, crew's quarters, telephones, TV and cassette music system because "it's kind of hard to play records while you're moving," Tayloe said.

Three spectacular yachts have already weaved between Louisiana's offshore oil rigs and moored at Schubert's Marine in Lake Pontchartrain. The Southerly, a 144-footer chartered by the Gannett newspaper chain, is so huge that it was stranded for a day outside the entrance to the canal where it was to be moored.

"The tide was too low," said Ward Stallings, dock manager at Schubert's. Gannett has hired an armed guard to protect the boat in the harbor. The Southerly and the Circus II, a $7 million, 140-foot yacht owned by a Florida Budweiser distributor and chartered by Anheuser-Busch, will be used for business entertaining. But the 100-foot Cherosa of Palm Beach, Fla., is Super Bowl home to fans of the Patriots--David and Rhoda Chase, owners of the Hartford, Conn., Hilton and their Yankee crew.

"We were in Miami for the playoffs," said the boat's captain, Andrew Urquhart. "They won, and--boom!--we bolted out of there and came here."

Fifty-year-old Bunky Hipple will enjoy considerably less luxury at the Parc D'Orleans trailer park, where he positioned his pickup truck and Air Stream trailer Tuesday after driving all night from Orlando. Hipple describes his occupation as "I go to Super Bowl games and I go to the races."

"It's the best party in the world," said the veteran of 16 of the previous 19 Super Bowls and holder of four tickets to Sunday's game. Of all the Super Bowl cities he has visited, he said, "New Orleans has the best parties." The Parc D'Orleans is expecting "a partying crowd," said Pat Trascher, trailer park owner and mother of a young son who knows all the words to the "Super Bowl Shuffle." "There are plenty of people coming in without tickets and just want to be part of the party."

At the nearby New Orleans Mardi Gras Camp Ground, manager Andre Lebat says that most of those staying in the park will use their recreational vehicles mainly for resting up from strenuous exertions in the French Quarter. "Most of them want to start partying early before the Super Bowl," he said. "It's going to be a nuthouse, plainly."

According to police, some fans are heading to New Orleans in their campers without trailer park reservations. Others have canceled reservations made in more confident days, Lebat says.

"We had a lot of Florida reservations early, but they canceled," he said. "You can understand that."

Barbara Brotman and Patrick Reardon, Chicago Tribune