Memories of the Orient Express?

Czesziafan · 29 Sep 2019

The Orient Express, or to be more precise the Direct Orient Express (not the modern high-end tourist train), ran between Paris and Istanbul until May 1977. Latterly it was reported to have been a shadow of its former glory and the preserve of backpackers and Turkish migrants workers rather than the well-heeled clientele of former days.

Does anyone have memories of travelling on this train during its last years? Was the journey a pleasure or a challenge?

RailUK Forums

STEVIEBOY1 · 30 Sep 2019

No I did not ever get to travel on it, but it has always fascinated me, I remember doing a project about it at school. I borrowed a number of books about the train and CIWL from the school and village libraries. It was one of the few things that I enjoyed doing at school. There were several versions and routes over the years.

Golghar · 30 Sep 2019

With the Summer time-table 1977 the name was changed from Simplon-Orient Express to Simplon Express and the train started terminating at Belgrade. I used it in August or September 1977 to travel from Divača to Postojna, both now within Slovenia. It reached Divača with a delay of 100 minutes and the it was a mix of French, Italian and Yugoslav carriages.
In The Great Railway Bazaar Paul Theroux describes a journey he made from Calais to Istanbul in 1973. This was in a through sleeping carriage that was taken by a small engine from Gare du Nord to Gare de Lyon on the périferique, where it was attached to the Simplon-Orient Express. This was the "Calais Coach" on which the Murder on the Orient Express took place (on the reverse journey). In the USA the novel was published as Murder in the Calais Coach. The fictional crime took place between the stations Vinkovci and Slavonski Brod, both now in Croatia.
In From Russian with Love James Bond travels on the train from Istanbul to Zagreb.
Graham Greens's Stamboul Train takes another route via Cologne, Vienna and Budapest and not through the Simplon Tunnel.

LNW-GW Joint · 30 Sep 2019

There's not much left of the Orient Express.
There's the nightly Balkan sleeper train from Sofia to Halkali, on the edge of Istanbul's metro system, which will take you to the old terminus at Sirkeci.
In summer there are through sleeper coaches from Bucharest added to this train at Dimitrovgrad.
In summer also, there is a connecting train from Belgrade to Sofia.

The route through Serbia, Bulgaria and Turkey is having major upgrades (largely completed in Bulgaria), but it is going to be 5 years or more before journey times can be improved.
The infrastructure beyond Budapest/Belgrade is little changed since originally built in the 1880s.
The Serbian Niš-Dimitrovgrad section to the Bulgarian border is being electrified now and is the last unwired section between western Europe and Istanbul.
The original station in Belgrade, opened in 1884, closed last year so that the site can be redeveloped.
Trains run instead to/from Beograd Centar, a new station further away from the city centre.

The original plan for the Oriental Railway, drawn up in the 1860s when the Ottoman Empire controlled most of the Balkans, would have gone through Sarajevo rather than Belgrade, reaching the "west" (the Austro-Hungarian Empire) at the Bosnia/Croatia border south of Zagreb.
This plan was overtaken by the Russian-Turkish war in the 1870s, and links via Belgrade and Budapest were built instead.
Bucharest was also on the Orient Express network of routes via Budapest.
The Simplon and Tauern routes via Ljubljana to Belgrade were only available after WW1.

parkender102 · 1 Oct 2019

In the mid to late 1980's I took a non stop train from Munich to Istanbul (same train all the way) and was aware it may or may not have been the Orient Express as I know there was a 'normal' Orient Express running at the time. I'm not sure where I could check such info? From memory it was 3 days / 2 nights - departure was quite late in the evening from Munich.

There were quite a few Turkish people heading home I assume having a break from studying or working in Germany. I met 2 Dutch Girls on the train who worked for the Dutch Railways and as a perk of their job they got free travel – they were heading to Antalya, after Istanbul I was heading down the West Coast of Turkey. I’m sure there was a dining car attached. I always remember the feeling of excitement passing through the suburbs of Istanbul (was there some form of ancient wall we passed through?)

In those days the International Expresses terminated at Sirkeci right in the centre but alas no more. Istanbul was like a different world – almost going back in time – a real feeling that you were on the edge of Europe and the start of Asia (I’d never been to Asia before). Amazing that you could just walk from the European side to the Asian side across the bridge over the Bosphorous. My travels afterwards were over to Greece then Western Europe but I always wished I'd just got on the train from Haydarpasa and continued to Iran and Syria and further afield.

LNW-GW Joint · 1 Oct 2019

parkender102 said:
In the mid to late 1980's I took a non stop train from Munich to Istanbul (same train all the way) and was aware it may or may not have been the Orient Express as I know there was a 'normal' Orient Express running at the time. I'm not sure where I could check such info? From memory it was 3 days / 2 nights - departure was quite late in the evening from Munich.

There's plenty of useful information on wiki detailing how the service declined in recent decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient_Express

In 1977, the Orient Express stopped serving Istanbul. Its immediate successor, a through overnight service from Paris to Bucharest—since 1991 only to Budapest, and in 2001 again shortened to Vienna—ran for the last time from Paris on Friday 8 June 2007. After this, the route, still called the "Orient Express", was shortened to start from Strasbourg instead, occasioned by the inauguration of the LGV Est which afforded much shorter travel times from Paris to Strasbourg. The new curtailed service left Strasbourg at 22:20 daily, shortly after the arrival of a TGV from Paris, and was attached at Karlsruhe to the overnight sleeper service from Amsterdam to Vienna.

This link has info on the original route plans and construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemins_de_fer_Orientaux

The Chemins de fer Orientaux was an Ottoman railway company operating in Rumelia (the European part of the Ottoman Empire, corresponding to the Balkan peninsula) and later European Turkey, from 1870 to 1937. The CO was one of the five pioneer railways in the Ottoman Empire and built the main trunk line in the Balkans. Between 1889 and 1937, when it was absorbed by the Turkish State Railways, the railway hosted the world-famous Orient Express.

Today, you don't have to walk across the Bosphorus bridge to get to Asia.
The metro which links Halkali and Sirkeci continues under the Bosphorus and links into the main line to Ankara in the eastern suburbs.
Main line trains are also planned through the same tunnel.
There's also going to be a through rail freight route over the currently road-only Yavuz Sultan Selim bridge which is at the northern end of the Bosphorus.

duesselmartin · 1 Oct 2019

I remember travelling on a D train called Orient Express from Paris to Budapest via Strasbourg, Stuttgart, München Ost, Salzburg, Wien West to Keleti pu. A lot of shunting ob the way with a sleeper to Bucuresti on it.
Later it ran only Strasbourg to Wien West with coaches from Amsterdam until the late 2000s.

MarcVD · 1 Oct 2019

LNW-GW Joint said:
Main line trains are also planned through the same tunnel.

They already do.
There are a few turkish high speed trains to or from Ankara that start or terminate in Halkali, every day.

MarcVD · 1 Oct 2019

parkender102 said:
My travels afterwards were over to Greece then Western Europe but I always wished I'd just got on the train from Haydarpasa and continued to Iran and Syria and further afield.

I precisely did that. But once you are in Iran, you do not have a lot of options to continue your journey further east by train...

On the other hand, this border between Turkey and Greece that you crossed is one of my dreams. Not sure it will be in this lifetime, though...

parkender102 · 2 Oct 2019

MarcVD said:
I precisely did that. But once you are in Iran, you do not have a lot of options to continue your journey further east by train...

On the other hand, this border between Turkey and Greece that you crossed is one of my dreams. Not sure it will be in this lifetime, though...

Hopefully travel to Iran and Syria will become viable again in the future but the current situation is not good politically or for safety reasons.

The border crossing was at Kapikule coming into Turkey and I seem to remember that the train I was on must have been routed through Bulgaria as I had to buy a transit visa for Bulgaria. Looking at the map I’m not even sure the train entered Greece – perhaps there is another Rail Crossing from Greece?

LNW-GW Joint · 2 Oct 2019

parkender102 said:
The border crossing was at Kapikule coming into Turkey and I seem to remember that the train I was on must have been routed through Bulgaria as I had to buy a transit visa for Bulgaria. Looking at the map I’m not even sure the train entered Greece – perhaps there is another Rail Crossing from Greece?

The new borders established after WW1 had the Sofia-Istanbul railway line crossing Greek territory before entering Turkey at Pythion, south of Edirne.
In 1971 Turkey built a 57km deviation line through Edirne to the Bulgarian border which stayed north of the Maritsa river and so avoided Greek territory.
Greece also built a short deviation so that it could reach the Bulgarian border without crossing the enclave of Turkish territory south of the Maritsa.
So after that, the Orient Express route avoided Greece.
Another casualty was the original station in Edirne, which was in the enclave bypassed.
It's still there, but has been repurposed as a university building instead.
You can still trace the old alignments on online maps.

The Greece-Turkey border rail bridge over the Maritsa further south at Pythion, forming a link between Thessaloniki and Istanbul, is still there, but I don't think there are any passenger services using it today.

MarcVD · 2 Oct 2019

parkender102 said:
Hopefully travel to Iran and Syria will become viable again in the future but the current situation is not good politically or for safety reasons.

The border crossing was at Kapikule coming into Turkey and I seem to remember that the train I was on must have been routed through Bulgaria as I had to buy a transit visa for Bulgaria. Looking at the map I’m not even sure the train entered Greece – perhaps there is another Rail Crossing from Greece?

Iran is a very safe country to travel, probably much safer than the United States... Syria, I agree with you, is another matter, and for the moment, no trains are running there anyway, even no trains to the closest big city in Turkey, Gaziantep.

I first saw mention of the Trans-Asia Express when I visited Istanbul with my wife in 2005. In the Haydarpaşa train station there was a map showing this train journey, and having seen it, I was sure that one day I would do it.

So in 2009 my wife and me departed Brussels for a train journey to Tehran, prelude of a 3 weeks stay over there. There was of course nothing like a direct train to Istanbul anymore, so the itinerary was:
- Day 1 ICE train to Köln
- Night 1 Sleeper to Munchen (in those DB double decker sleepers, awful)
- Day 2 ÖBB Railjet to Budapest
- Night 2 Sleeper to Bucharest
- Day/Night 3 Sleeper to Istanbul
We had a 2 nights buffer time in Istanbul and then we set off to Tehran with the weekly Trans-Asia Express.
After a visit of Tehran, we went by road to Shiraz (Persepolis!), Ispahan, Yazd, and Kerman.
At that time, Kerman was the easternmost point reached by the long distance trains from Tehran. The line to BAM was already open, but served only by local trains. We did not go, because of the earthquake that devastated that city a few years before. So from there, we took an overnight train to Mashhad, and then an overnight train again to Tehran for our flight back to Brussels.

What I meant is that once you are in Iran, you don't have much options to continue further East, unless you are very adventurous:
- Now that the line to Zahedan is open, there is this bimonthly train to Quetta, which is nothing more than a basic passenger car hooked on a freighter;
- And from Mashhad, you can take a train to Serakhs, at the turkmen border, cross the border by foot, and then take a turkmen train to Ashgabat.
None of those options are very civilized and although I dream to go by train to India some day, I doubt very much it will ever happen. But who knows?

Regarding your other question, yes there is a rail border crossing between Greece and Turkey, in Pithion, as LNW-GW Joint just explained. Until 2011, there was a daily night train between Istanbul and Thessaloniki that used this border crossing. Sadly, OSE cancelled it as a cost-cutting measure and it was never re-instated. There were two train sets, one turkish using TVS2000 coaches, and a greek one using second hand Wagon-Lits from SNCF. If it ever comes back, it will be my next trip.

parkender102 · 2 Oct 2019

MarcVD said:
Iran is a very safe country to travel, probably much safer than the United States... Syria, I agree with you, is another matter, and for the moment, no trains are running there anyway, even no trains to the closest big city in Turkey, Gaziantep.

I first saw mention of the Trans-Asia Express when I visited Istanbul with my wife in 2005. In the Haydarpaşa train station there was a map showing this train journey, and having seen it, I was sure that one day I would do it.

So in 2009 my wife and me departed Brussels for a train journey to Tehran, prelude of a 3 weeks stay over there. There was of course nothing like a direct train to Istanbul anymore, so the itinerary was:
- Day 1 ICE train to Köln
- Night 1 Sleeper to Munchen (in those DB double decker sleepers, awful)
- Day 2 ÖBB Railjet to Budapest
- Night 2 Sleeper to Bucharest
- Day/Night 3 Sleeper to Istanbul
We had a 2 nights buffer time in Istanbul and then we set off to Tehran with the weekly Trans-Asia Express.
After a visit of Tehran, we went by road to Shiraz (Persepolis!), Ispahan, Yazd, and Kerman.
At that time, Kerman was the easternmost point reached by the long distance trains from Tehran. The line to BAM was already open, but served only by local trains. We did not go, because of the earthquake that devastated that city a few years before. So from there, we took an overnight train to Mashhad, and then an overnight train again to Tehran for our flight back to Brussels.

What I meant is that once you are in Iran, you don't have much options to continue further East, unless you are very adventurous:
- Now that the line to Zahedan is open, there is this bimonthly train to Quetta, which is nothing more than a basic passenger car hooked on a freighter;
- And from Mashhad, you can take a train to Serakhs, at the turkmen border, cross the border by foot, and then take a turkmen train to Ashgabat.
None of those options are very civilized and although I dream to go by train to India some day, I doubt very much it will ever happen. But who knows?

Regarding your other question, yes there is a rail border crossing between Greece and Turkey, in Pithion, as LNW-GW Joint just explained. Until 2011, there was a daily night train between Istanbul and Thessaloniki that used this border crossing. Sadly, OSE cancelled it as a cost-cutting measure and it was never re-instated. There were two train sets, one turkish using TVS2000 coaches, and a greek one using second hand Wagon-Lits from SNCF. If it ever comes back, it will be my next trip.

Excellent - a very ambitious journey! The train I took back in the 1980's I assumed had Sleeper and Couchette Carriages but as I was travelling alone and cheaply via Interrail I just picked an unreserved seat in a compartment of 6 and slept in the seat for 2 nights! The seats used to recline flat - in effect creating a huge double bed for 6 people. A lot younger in those days and don't think I could do it now unless I had a Couchette or Sleeper berth.

gordonthemoron · 2 Oct 2019

I went on the second last Orient Express services from Ulm to Vienna in December 2009, OEBB couchettes with nothing to stop you falling out of your bunk

Memories of the Orient Express?

Czesziafan

Member

RailUK Forums

STEVIEBOY1

Established Member

Golghar

Member

LNW-GW Joint

Veteran Member

parkender102

Member

LNW-GW Joint

Veteran Member

duesselmartin

Established Member

MarcVD

Member

MarcVD

Member

parkender102

Member

LNW-GW Joint

Veteran Member

MarcVD

Member

parkender102

Member

gordonthemoron

Established Member