The Orient Express by John Weich

When it comes to making an entrance, few transport modes can show up a gleaming Orient Express Pullman as it enters the Venezia Santa Lucia train station with a sky blue uniformed steward leaning comfortably out the door. It’s a fortuitous event on par with watching an erratic Concorde landing at JFK. Heads turn; passers-by gawk. In Venice, where even in the winter months the crowds are a nimbus of backpackers and locals, the Pullman’s power of persuasion brings even Italy’s conversational gesticulation to a near standstill. In this age of nostalgia, when something historic enters, you do your best to stand at attention.

Logic, however, says that the ever-increasing velocity of travel combined with the rock bottom ticket prices of low-budget carriers like Ryannair and Easyjet is a perfect cocktail to put an old, decorous dinosaur like the Orient Express out of business. And it’s not just air travel that competes with the Oriental Express’s old school charm. Prestige projects on the rail compete as well: bullet trains in Japan, TGVs in France, Deutsche Bahn’s high-speed ICEs and the advent of magnetic Maglev trains, which can attain speeds of 505 kilometers per hour, are all realities; the latter saw its first run in Shanghai late last year. Why then would anyone set aside the cash or the time to travel from Venice to London on a train that’s been around for over a century?

Because it’s the Orient Express, that’s why. Like the Concorde and the retired Queen Mary before it – or even, for the more adventurous, the Trans-Siberian Express, which after 80 years is finally entirely electric – the Orient Express has an aristocratic air about it. Even postmodernists who prefer their landscapes passing by at Mach speed cannot deny the iconic grandeur of the world’s most luxurious train.

Trains are back. Give the French credit; their enormous investment in TGV rails over the past two decades has spurred on the rest of Europe to upgrade their infrastructure. No one in their right might flies from London to Paris anymore, because it’s easier, often cheaper and always more comfortable taking the Eurostar. The same goes for the Thalys between Amsterdam and Paris or the ICE between Hamburg and Frankfurt. But in terms of sheer luxury and style, the Orient Express is the undisputed king of rail travel.

A trip on the Orient Express is, for most, a one-off, a once in a lifetime experience. The perky trepidation of rosy-cheeked Americans dressed in floral patterns and middle-aged Brits in tasseled loafers congregating before the train in Venice say as much. Fortunately for me, there was also a modest number of young couples and lone-wolfs in more casual couture boarding the train. Bolstered by the economic bonanza of the 1990s and wealth spread more evenly across the board, the Orient Express is not all honeymooners and septugarians. The immaculately groomed chefs and cabin stewards and a new appreciation of the Art Deco aesthetic appeal to a younger crowd as well. It’s not quite a Carnival Cruise, but it’s not all ageing aristocracy either.

The Simplon-Orient-Express was introduced in 1919 and acquired its name due to a 12 mile long engineering feet through the Alps called the Simplon Tunnel that facilitated the 56-hour journey from Paris to Constantinople, now Istanbul. The Orient Express had existed for nearly half a century by this time, but the European beneficiaries of the post-First World War economic boom choose the Simplon-Orient-Express as its symbol of Roaring Twenties prosperity. This éclat stuck for the greater part of the 20th century, during which time the Simplon line became the preferred method for discerning passengers traversing the continent.

By 1977, with society ever more fixated with the advent of air travel, the Orient Express was a mere shadow of its former self. A Sotheby’s auction held in Monte Carlo that year for the purpose of selling off the five carriages featured in the film Murder on the Orient Express was generally seen as the end of the era of luxury train travel. In a way it was; air travel was both faster and more glamorous; a dining car on the ground simply couldn’t compete with a Boeing 747 luxury lounge at 35,000 feet. But of the five carriages auctioned off that day, American entrepreneur James Sherwood was able to get his hands on two. And Sherwood wanted the Orient Express to survive.

It took Sherwood nearly five years to locate the remaining rolling stock and to renovate and resurrect the Simplon-Orient-Express as the Venice Simplon Orient-Express, or VS-O-E, a luxurious, charmingly anachronistic novelty in the Jet Age. Unveiled with much fanfare in 1982, today it is a theatrical alternative to flying from London to Venice via Paris and Innsbruck. It is a resort on wheels and it is something special.

Once aboard the VS-O-E it took me a few hours to adjust to my role. Only once the train begins to dart through the tunnels of the Dolomites was I truly at ease with the pre-Depression pageantry: the restored marquetry interiors, the elaborate mosaic bathroom floors and the VS-O-E’s signature salmon, camel, pink and leaf color palette. The train’s layout is based entirely on original artifacts – from the reproduction of chairs, cutlery and china to the bottom-heavy vases (to keep them from tipping), bed linens and photogenic fin de siecle livery of the hospitality-educated stewards. At no time during the journey did I question its authenticity; if the stewards and chefs and managers are playing a role, they never let down their guard. And social etiquette requires that I play along. Guests are encouraged to arrive in festive dress and don their very best behavior. It’s self-deception, but of the most willing kind.

Meanwhile the Alpine landscape moves by slowly, at times excruciatingly so. But the stewards and chefs keep you busy. After a brief introduction, my cabin attendant arrives, introduces himself, shows me how to lock the door, turn on the fan, man the reading light and push the black button that will summon him on a moment’s notice. For lunch, there are two sittings at 11.45 and 1.15, followed by high tea at 4.15. During a brief stop at Innsbruck passengers are encouraged to take a refreshing stroll down the platform. A few leave the train for good; discerning Austrian and Italian businessmen know the OE is most comfortable way to get from Italy to Austria. Well-dressed passengers ask the stewards to strike poses for antiquity, for family’s at home, and they request that they blow their high-pitched whistles for video purposes. By now you are used to the festival atmosphere, and the gawking faces of passers-by only enhance the feeling that you are part of something special.

For dinner there are also two sittings, one at 7pm and the other at 9pm. It is the only way to accommodate all the passengers. Aperitifs and pre-prandial cocktails are served in the phenomenal Bar Car from early evening on. The brochure had advised to dress snazzy, but nothing prepared me for the black ties and sequined cocktail gowns I encountered upon entry. During the day a dark, musky escape from the confines of my cabin, in the evening the Bar Car is The Great Gatsby revisited. Cigars abound, garrulous piano men and bartenders with slicked back follicles pouring stiff, forgotten drinks into VS-O-E insignia crystal glasses. Like the best luxury hotels, everything in the train is stamped with the curvaceous VS-O-E insignia. And like anything remotely iconic, it’s all for sale: silk scarves (‘with map design depicting the London to Venice route of the legendary train’), pillboxes, cashmere teddy bears, Ameline calf leather conductors bag, antimacassars, hand blown French crystal, a wooden VS-O-E Guard Incense Burner, ties, umbrellas, towels, pens and the enamel and brass letter openers. The offer is mind boggling, and after twenty minutes of looming in the gift shop shadows I am convinced this diminutive onboard store ranks among the most profitable shops per square meter on the planet.

After an elaborate three-course meal and a few more drinks in the crowded Bar Car the manager allows me to peek into the VS-O-E Golden Book, a tome dedicated to the myriad of regulars and celebrities who have found themselves on board and were recognized. If anything else, it is a monument to the VS-O-E’s aspirational status even in the world of Hollywood stars. Caricatures by Phil Collins, a drawing by Peter Gabriel, a doodle by Francis Ford Copola, a succinct note by David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), a thank you from JK Rowling, a Samantha Fox signature. More interesting however are the faceless regulars that sign both by name and number of VS-O-E journeys – I tallied 62 trips by a certain John Leander. I am thinking, Who is this man?

The VS-O-E may be the parade horse of the Orient Express Group, but it is only one aspect of the company’s business. After expanding its portfolio gradually throughout the 1980s, in recent years the group has ventured more aggressively into luxury trains in the UK and Southeast Asia, five-star hotels such as the Cipriani in Venice, the Copacabana Palace in Rio and the salmon-tinted Lapa Palace in Lisbon, safaris in Botswana and river cruises in Myanmar. To give you an indication of their customer demographics; they’ll lease a private jet to get you to wherever you need to go as long as it bears the group’s insignia.

More recently, the company has forayed into the upscale restaurant market by opening The Upstairs at the “21” club on West 52 in New York. Situated in a former Speakeasy, the exclusive 32-seat restaurant featuring Erik Blauberg’s haute American cuisine has been a hit among celebrities and their likes. In 2003, the company will also reopen one of Buenos Aires’s most celebrated steakhouses, La Cabaña. Not surprisingly, the group hopes to recreate the intimate atmosphere – think French-Rococo interior with open fireplaces and wall-mounted boar heads – which once made this restaurant a favorite for Argentina’s leisure class.

Perhaps its most interesting venture has yet to come. The company is looking into the possibilities of introducing a first class Orient Express line between Washington DC and New York that will offer luxury service on a more habitual basis. The idea might not be as far-fetched as it sounds; between the wars the Orient Express built and operated thousands of carriages as luxury expresses across Europe. The route between New York and Washington DC is one of Amtrak’s most profitable, and if the OE succeeds in launching the service it will introduce a bit of European regality to Washingtonian diplomats.

In the morning, after a stroll through the train, I returned to a made-up room and a breakfast of fresh croissants (picked up that morning in Basel, Switzerland) and two cappuccinos served in weighty silver canisters. Eventually, the silent wheat fields of the French interior gave way to the gray outskirts of the French capital. Aware that I would be jumping ship in Paris, the bright-eyed steward presented me with a bar bill that was more reasonable than expected and then schlepped my luggage to the door just as we were pulling into Gare l’Est. ‘It’s a shame you’re leaving us in Paris,’ he said. ‘You’ll miss the lobster lunch and the ferry across the Channel.’ When I stepped down onto the platform a crowd of onlookers peered over my head and took a picture of my cabin steward, who smiled obligingly. Their tennis shoes welcomed me back to the 21st century. It was only 24 hours later, but I felt like I had been gone for a very long while.