2013-3 - Orient Express - Aug-Sep, 2013

In 2013, we returned to Europe for an epic train journey, recreating the route of the famed Orient Express train from Paris to Istanbul (although we travelled Istanbul-Paris). We had to recreate the route because the actual “Orient Express” as a regularly ticketed service actually ended in 2009. For a complete history of the real Orient Express, refer to “The Man in Seat 61” whose expertise in all things to do with rail travel is unequalled.

We did not take the private train cars offered by Simplon Orient Express. Instead we stuck to the scheduled trains of the various national railway services just as the real Orient Express ran for over 100 years. (Although, sadly, at the end in 2009, the train named the Orient Express only ran from Strasbourg to Vienna, and Vienna is hardly the gateway to the orient!) We travelled from Istanbul to Paris, sticking to the original route shown in red on the map below. We did go by train from Paris to London, via Eurostar service through the “chunnel”, an engineering wonder only dreamed about during the heyday of the Orient Express in the 1920s.

We started off in Istanbul since it’s not only a favourite city of ours, it has the original railway terminus of the Orient Express route, and the famous Pera Palace Hotel established by the Wagons-Lits Company in 1894 specifically to cater for Orient Express clientele (and pictured above).

After our exploration of Istanbul was over, our attempt to reproduce the route exactly was thwarted from the very start since there is no longer ferry service from Istanbul (in Turkey), to Varna (in Bulgaria). We had to settle for a bus! But after that we rode the rails through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria (although we were fast asleep on a night train), Germany, France, and the UK. With a short detour to a couple of countries not on the original route (Switzerland and Liechtenstein) it was a rail journey that took us through 10 countries!