French Orient Express restarts in 2024
The Orient Express. The train that forever changed luxury travel almost 140 years ago (debuted October 4, 1883) is being brought back to life yet again – but this time by French hospitality group Accor, which uses the Orient Express name under license from SNCF, France’s national train service.
It’s not the first train service to do this. The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express by Belmond has been operating for years. I was lucky enough to take a day-long murder mystery ride on the train. David Suchet (the actor for Hercule Poirot) also took a trip on the train:
Starting in 2024 this most recent rebirth of the railroad icon will gear up to resume service from the French capital to the rest of the continent, reviving the same lavish journeys of its heyday. While details and itineraries have yet to be confirmed, it’s likely that some of the routes will end in Istanbul, just as it was for the first Orient Express.
What’s more amazing is that many of the original cars have been found and are being restored right now.
In total, seventeen cars—12 sleeping cars, one restaurant, three lounges, and one caboose—will form the ‘new’ convoy. All of them date back to the 1920s and ’30s and used to form what was known as the Nostalgie-Istanbul Orient-Express (the train took different names depending on its routes).
In 2015, industrial history researcher Arthur Mettetal embarked on a worldwide quest to inventory what was left of the Orient Express for SNCF. The luxury train company had shut down in 1977, but different iterations of the Orient Express had been briefly resurrected in the 1980s, only to disappear almost completely by the following decade (save for the Belmond’s Venice Simplon-Orient-Express rail service, part of a completely separate venture). In the intervening years, many of the trains had gone off the grid.
During the course of his survey, Mattatel came across an anonymously posted YouTube video. He analyzing the clip for clues and located it on the border between Belarus and Poland.
A few months later, Mettetal traveled to Warsaw with Saint Lager, as well as a translator and a photographer and found them. They had been there for about 10 years.
“We were expecting them to be in terrible condition, but inside they were surprisingly well-preserved,” recounts Saint Lager. “Some of them still had the original Lalique glass panels that were so emblematic of the Orient Express. We also found Morrison and Nelson marquetry,” which are intricate wood carvings with inlays of precious materials like gold or ebony. “The Art Deco details were just incredibly vibrant,” Saint Lager says. Following two years of negotiation between Accor and the owner of the Nostalgie-Istanbul, the train was eventually escorted back to France where they are being refurbished.
Tickets will go on sale in 2023—but if you can’t wait, there’s always the Orient Express La Dolce Vita (another project by Accor) slated to hit the tracks soon.
