Europe's fabled Orient Express returns in pristine splendor
It was known in its gilded heyday as the train of kings. It also transported in regal splendor diplomats, divas and duchesses, the beau monde and the demimonde, maharajahs, moguls and con men, courtesans, couriers, private eyes and spies. Thundering across empires to the edge of Asia, the Orient Express was the most celebrated train in history. It retired ignobly in May 1977, aged 94, a shrunken outcast of the hurry-up age. Then, last May, it rose again in all its pristine opulence as a regularly scheduled year-round train luxe, plying between London and Venice. The once and future train is called the Venice Simplon Orient-Express (V.S.O.E.). Among recent passengers on both the south-and northbound runs was TIME Senior Writer Michael Demurest, who once rode the fabled express as a boy. His report:
"To board this train," intoned James I B. Sherwood, "should be an event.
We're not selling transportation." It is, and they're not, thanks largely to Sherwood, 49, a big blue-eyed Kentuckian who heads London-based Sea Containers Group. It is this profitable containerized shipping company (1981 earnings: $35.4 million) that owns and operates the new venture, having acquired and refurbished 35 old Orient Express cars over five years at a cost of $20 million. To emphasize the special nature of the inaugural run last spring, for example, passengers were encouraged to wear '20s finery, and many did so. On current trips, passengers often don evening clothes for dinner, and the champagne, a special V.S.O.E. label bottled by Laurent Perrier, flows freely. And as Sherwood has promised, "The bar-salon stays open, and our pianist plays on, until the last guest has retired." "When a Broadway baby says good night," plunks Giany Bars at the baby grand piano, "it's early in the morning."
On the 24-hour, 926-mile London-to-Venice trip, the train leaves Victoria Station at 11:44 a.m. each Friday and Sun day. The northbound V.S.O.E. leaves Venice's Santa Lucia Station at 5:25 p.m. on Saturday and Wednesday. The English segment of the train, which does not cross the channel, consists of seven chocolate-and-cream cars that were built for the old Orient Express. They have comfortable English names like Audrey and Agatha (not for Miss Christie, who wrote Murder on the Orient Express) or else daunting classical appellations like Perseus and Phoenix. Some English passengers are greeted by name at Victoria by brown-liveried Brian Hannaford, an oldtime Pullman chief steward who has also been restored to service.
Rolling through the viridian Kentish countryside, there is time for a leisurely lunch, a free, staunchly English repast designed perhaps to fortify tender turns against the Gallic frivolities to follow. At Folkestone, passengers board a reserved veranda deck on the Sealink cross-channel ferry. In 90 minutes passengers are ashore at the great French port of Boulogne.