“Orient Express: The Life and Times of the World's Most Famous Train” E. H. Cookridge

 

287 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0394411767

Orient Express: The Life and Times of the World's Most Famous Train by E. H. Cookridge has been floating around the Fraser Public Library for so long that it still has its original checkout card inside of the front cover – blank, sadly; I would have loved to have seen the names of the past readers of this book. But anyhoo…

I am unfamiliar with E. H. Cookridge but, judging from Orient Express, he seems to me to be a straight-forward no-nonsense old school historian who has written a history that subscribes to this brand of history. In structuring his chapters, Cookridge encapsulated the life and times of this famous train, leading us from the original concept and a biography of its creator – Georges Lambert Casimir Nagelmackers, a Belgian civil engineer and businessman – the formation of its parent company – Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits or International Sleeping-Car Company – its Maiden Voyage – on 4 October 4^th, 1883, from the Gare de l’Est in Paris to Giurgiu in Romania via Munich and Vienna – and all of the other glorious adventures and misadventures of both the train and some of the notorious, celebrated passengers, to the sad demise and final auctioning-off of its original remains in Monte Carlo in 1977, though the service continued.

While Cookridge explores many of the invented outlines, plots and subplots of the famous fictional accounts – James Bond, Agatha Christie and Hollywood and all the rest – these fictional accounts pale in comparison to the true-life adventures of robbery, banditti, kidnapping, near-starvation and frostbite in the ice-age winter of 1929 and derailments into snow and German station restaurants (however, I was hoping for more photographs of the train and passengers in question; I had to settle for mostly artistic renderings). The last train with the name Orient-Express (now with a hyphen) departed from Vienna on December 10^th, 2009, and one day later from Strasbourg; however, on December 8^th, 2020, it was announced that sleeper service between Vienna and Paris via Munich would be reestablished in 2021 (sadly, as of this writing this has yet to happen, although the Austrian Nightjet runs three times per week on the Paris-Vienna route).

Perhaps – just perhaps – this Old World form of luxurious travel can and will reestablish itself as the standard for travel?