by D. Vogt

Created on: August 11, 2010

The Orient Express was a famous French luxury passenger rail service which ran from Paris to Istanbul, Turkey, beginning in 1883. A symbol of the best in railway passenger service during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it acquired its significance in popular culture, the Orient Express unfortunately  no longer exists as such. Over the past several decades, several truncated routes have covered part of the ground once traversed by the Orient Express, though they still carried the name "Orient Express" through 2009. Still, read any European spy fiction from the period, or even in the postwar period, and you're sure to come across some reference to the Orient Express and the spies who allegedly used it.

The Orient Express had its genesis in Belgium in the 1860s and 1870s. There, the Compagnie International des Wagons-Lits - a company which specialized in luxury sleeper cars, and was in a sense the European equivalent of America's Pullman company - believed profit could be made from what its owner described as a continent-spanning, 1500-mile "continuous ribbon of metal." In 1882, the man in question, Georges Nagelmackers, took a select party of clients on a luxury trip from Paris to Vienna, Austria, and back again.

This became a regular route the next year, running from Paris through Munich, Germany; Romania; and finally Vienna, Austria. Despite Nagelmackers's vision of a "continuous ribbon," passengers not only had to switch trains there, but even leave the station and take a ferry across the Danube River. A second train then picked up them up on the other side, in present-day Bulgaria, and took them to Varna, from which they took another ferry trip to Constantinople, Ottoman Empire, the city now known as Istanbul, Turkey. Over the next twenty years, the route through Ottoman territory shifted somewhat, although the ultimate objective was always Istanbul. In total, the trip took about three-and-a-half days.

The Orient Express survived in this form until the onset of the First World War in 1914, at which time service had to be suspended for the duration of the war, since it ran through multiple warring nations. Service resumed promptly after the November 1918 armistice. In the interwar period, service expanded significantly, resulting in the creation of several "Orient Express" routes": the original German route, a southern route running through Italy, and eventually a central route running past Zurich, Switzerland.

It was this interwar Orient

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