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As is the Passover tradition, the youngest will ask the Four Questions. Only at this seder, it might sound something like this:

Mah nishtanah halailah…Choo! Choo!

That's because this seder won't take place at Aunt Judy's. It will happen inside a moving Amtrak train.

The Coast Starlight, on its daily northbound run from Los Angeles, will be the clickety-clack location of a unique seder for a group of Bay Area high school students on Tuesday, April 18, the day before Passover begins.

An expected 20 to 25 teens will board the train two days earlier in Emeryville, stay two nights in Los Angeles, take a guided tour of the Museum of Tolerance and then — the coup de grâce — participate in a pre-Passover seder on the train ride home.

A spokesperson for Amtrak was pretty sure it would be the first time gefilte fish would be served on one of its trains.

Irene Altshuler, a 16-year-old San Franciscan, said the excitement level is high.

"There's a lot of people that have signed up already and they can't wait to go," said the George Washington High sophomore, who was one of the first to come aboard.

"Everyone thinks it'll be cool to go to L.A. and that having a seder on a train is a great program."

The seder is expected to take place in a regular coach car, rather than a dining or observation car.

"We'll have the whole coach car to ourselves, so we'll really make use of that car and its space. Obviously, it won't be ideal, but it will work. We'll all come together as a community," said Erik Ludwig, the teen program manager at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.

The JCC is co-sponsoring the event, along with Camp Tawonga.

The program, called "All Aboard the Tolerance Train," is designed to teach the teens about appreciating diversity. A variety of means will be used to achieve the goal, including discussion groups, the museum visit, a series of skits and creative interpretations and extrapolations of the Haggadah.

As of Monday, 13 teens had signed up for the journey, which will begin on the morning of April 16 on an Amtrak connector bus in San Francisco. The group will hook up with the train in Emeryville and depart on an 11-hour, 23-minute ride.

That leaves plenty of time for something teens love to do: talk. On the southbound trip, "we're going to be discussing tolerance by looking at themes throughout the Passover story," said Joey Pruger, the assistant director at Camp Tawonga. "We'll bring those themes back through history, into the Holocaust and modern times."

After that, the teens will break into small groups and be assigned a portion of the Haggadah on which to focus. Part of their assignment will be to come up with a skit.

In Los Angeles, the travelers will stay at a local JCC. On April 17, dinner is slated for Santa Monica or Venice Beach.

"Then we'll wake up the next morning and hop back on the train," said Ludwig, who came up with the idea for the program.

And when the conductor says, "All aboard," he'll also be referring to the shank bone, the 12 to 15 boxes of matzah, the bitter herbs, the charoset, the parsley and the other Passover accoutrements that will be loaded onto the train at the L.A. depot.

But don't think for a second that Amtrak will be providing any of that stuff. Apparently, their cooks don't do matzah ball soup or gefilte fish.

"We're going to be taking care of all the food ourselves," said Sarah Weinberg, the JCC's teen program coordinator. "We'll bring it on in Tupperware and other containers."

There will be no short cuts, she added. "This will be a full seder-plate experience."

The seder is scheduled last two or three hours. Most of the Haggadah will be portrayed through skits rather than narration. The teens will have to make do as best they can with the setup of the coach rail car, sitting on their seats and twisting to face the narrow aisle.

Regardless of that obstacle, Ludwig is excited about the experience.

"Part of what I was trying to figure out was how we can look at a seder — which most of these teens have done — in a way that can give it renewed meaning," he said.

Of course, he might have a little explaining to do when a future Amtrak passenger finds a small square of matzah hidden underneath his seat — a piece of the afikomen that went undiscovered.