(FORTUNE Small Business) – I'm beginning to envy rock stars a little less," announces Bill Shea. He's sitting--bouncing, actually--inside a conference room that's now rolling across Connecticut. The 55-year-old has his cellphone out and his laptop open to his e-mail, where he's sent a message boasting of his unusual whereabouts. Comes the curt reply: "Your bus deal doesn't strike my fancy." Wait, did somebody call what we're traveling on a bus? "It is a luxury bus," insists Shea, an international sales manager at Harvard Business School Publishing in Watertown, Mass. "A bumpy luxury bus."

He'd best not share his revelation with Fergus McCann, the Scottish-born entrepreneur who spent some $540,000 to build this 28-seat, uh, motor coach. McCann, 62, does not want his creation confused with any more pedestrian mode of transport. "Fergus has trained us very well when it comes to the B-word," says Sabrina Kim, a customer service rep at McCann's Boston headquarters. "People call up and they want to know, 'Is it a bus?' I tell them, 'Yes it is, but I can't say it.' "

McCann has branded it the LimoLiner. In October he put two on the road, and he soon had them making three roundtrips a day between downtown Boston and Midtown Manhattan. "This is a small company, and it's not meant to be big," says McCann, who previously started and sold a tour business for golfers and turned around Scotland's Celtic Football Club in Glasgow.

After moving to suburban Boston in 1999, McCann concluded that the crowded Boston-New York corridor would be ideal for rolling out a new form of business transportation. He set out to derail Amtrak, going so far as to file a Freedom of Information Act request and contact his Congressman's office for accurate information about the railroad's on-time performance. He got nowhere but remains convinced that if he can attract 3% of Amtrak's ridership, which has been growing since 9/11, he'll be on the right track. He has priced the LimoLiner at $69 one-way ($5 more than a standard train fare, $30 less than Amtrak's Acela Express, and $172.50 less than a plane at full fare) and figures he needs each one-way trip to be half full for the company to break even. He's aiming to post an operating profit in 18 months--by which time he will have invested $2 million. Says McCann, who sold his majority interest in the soccer club for slightly more than $60 million: "As long as we can get enough people to try it, we'll be fine."

Such pronouncements are what make the owlish McCann's startup so compelling. Rather than endlessly road-testing consumer interest beforehand, he's put the product out there and is counting on those who use it to spread the L-word. "The people I work with are eager to hear how I like it," confirms Shea, one of 12 passengers on a 6 A.M. departure out of Boston. It's hard not to be dazzled by such amenities as Internet access, satellite TV, and an onboard attendant who serves up meals and movies and solves IT problems. Martin Fleisher, 45, a New York attorney who is on an afternoon departure from Manhattan, grouses that the Internet connection is slow. But "it's amazing that they even have it," he adds.

Still, many of those on the two LimoLiner rides I took wondered whether McCann's idea could really fly. Olie Thorp, a lecturer in finance at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., worries that the bus takes at least as long as a standard train (four hours) and about twice as long (if you're lucky) as a plane. "Timing is everything for businesspeople," reasons the 61-year-old retiree. Venture capitalist Andrew Clapp came away impressed. "This provides a better experience--at a lower cost--than the train does for the businessman," says Clapp, 60, who does not invest in transportation. McCann isn't waiting for anybody to flash him a red or green light. "Look," he says, "I intend to make this work."