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A Belgian named George Nagelmackers visited the U. S. in the 1860's, purchased the patent of the Mann Railway Sleeping Car Carriage, precursor of Puliman. In Brussels he founded what is now La Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Europeens (The International Company of Sleeping Cars and of Great European Expresses). This firm, called Wagons-Lits for short, not only supplies individual dining and sleeping cars to European railways, much as Pullman does to U. S. railways, but also makes up entire trains (except the locomotives), and arranges with a score of governments to run them uninterruptedly across Europe and Asia. Longest (preWar) run under Wagons-Lits auspices was Paris-Berlin-Moscow-Irkutsk-Yladivostok. 7,800 miles. Bolsheviks stole all Wagons-Lits cars on which they could lay their hands, and still operate them. Germany operates more of her own sleeping cars than any other continental power. But Wagons-Lits expresses such as the "Nord Express" roar nightly over the Paris-Berlin-Riga route.
Most luxurious of all Wagons-Lits trains are now its all-steel, so-called ''Pullmans," sumptuous sitting-room cars with chairs and tables, first introduced on the Paris-London Golden Arrow. But to Europeans the train of glamor remains the Orient Express, weathered and creaky though many of its sleepers are.
By 'The Orient Express" most Europeans mean loosely any one of several interconnecting trains which link Paris and Berlin with Athens, Istanbul and Bucharest across a middle zone comprising Vienna, Venice, Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia. Of these interconnecting Grands Express the most typical is the Simplon Orient Express on which it costs $171 First Class and $121 Second (there is no third) to span the 1.886 miles between Paris and Istanbul in 2½ days. Including all stops and fooling around at eight frontiers, the Simplon Orient nonetheless averages 30 m.p.h.
Through travelers hand their passports to the French porter, are seldom disturbed by frontier passport control officers except for a quick glance, or occasionally at night a rap on the compartment door and the stab of a flashlight. If suspected of being a spy, the thing to do is to raise a terrific hubbub and demand that the express be held while you telegraph the nearest U. S. Legation which in the Balkans will reply faster than you would think. Usually the express will wait.
Seven years ago Wagons-Lits bought Thomas Cook & Son with the result that on the Orient Express one can now escape the necessity of paying for things in seven kinds of money. Buying ticket and meal coupons or books in Paris at Wagons-Lits-Cook's opposite the Madeleine, you hop a taxi to the smoky Gare du Nord, step aboard the Simplon Orient at 5:53 p. m.. wake up next morning just as you are diving under the Alps through the famed Simplon Tunnel and breakfast as you swish by the Italian lakes and Stresa.