John Train (investment advisor)

Train died on August 13, 2022, at a hospital in Rockport, Maine, aged 94.

Train served in the U.S. Army. After working in Wall Street, he founded the New York investment counsel firm now known as Train, Babcock Advisors. During this period, he became the principal owner of Château Malescasse, a Cru Bourgeois wine producer in Lamarque, Gironde in France. He was chairman of the Montrose Group, investment advisers and tax accountants, and was a director of a major emerging markets mutual fund. He was the founder-chairman of the Train Foundation, which since 2000 has annually awarded the Civil Courage Prize for "steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk." The Prize was inspired by the career of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, with whom Train once worked closely. Asked whether he would prefer to receive the prize, or have it named after him, or be a judge, Solzhenitsyn chose the last, which he did to the end of his life. The trustees and directors of the Civil Courage Prize include five ambassadors: American, English and South African. He was an overseer of the Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University (affiliated with the United Nations), and was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute of Strategic Studies (London).

Train had two decorations from the Italian government for humanitarian work, and was an officer of the (British) Order of St. John. In 1980, he helped to establish the Afghanistan Relief Committee to provide medicine and food to the victims of the Soviet invasion, serving first as its treasurer and later as president. The ARC merged with the International Rescue Committee, whose board he joined. He was an original trustee of the American University in Bulgaria.

Train married Maria Teresa Cini di Pianzano; they had two daughters and later divorced. In 1977, he married Francie Cheston. and had two more daughters. One of his children became an active member of his firm. Another daughter was married to Paul Klebnikov, a journalist murdered in Russia.

Train was born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Helen Coster Gerard and Arthur Train. His father was a district attorney in New York City and the author of the popular "Ephraim Tutt" stories that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in the 1930s and 1940s. He graduated Groton School in 1946. He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1950 and a Master of Arts in 1951. He was editor of the The Harvard Lampoon and the Signet Society. In 1953, he co-founded and became the first managing editor of The Paris Review, which won attention by publishing extended interviews with such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder and William Faulkner.

John Pell Coster Train (May 25, 1928 – August 13, 2022) was an American investment advisor and writer. He was a founding editor of The Paris Review.