To most people the Orient Express is more an idea than a tangible entity. We are most familiar with its life in fiction and cinema: Hercule Poirot solved his most famous case on it, Alfred Hitchock's lady vanished from it and James Bond rode it from Istanbul to London.
Now, the latest iteration of the legendary train is chugging back to the big screen as director Kenneth Branagh tries his hand at remaking Agatha Christie's classic murder-mystery tale.
But what was the real Orient Express like, how did it first attain its aura of mystery and intrigue and what was the famous train's ultimate fate?
A Continental Vision
In 1865, a prominent Belgian banker's son named Georges Nagelmackers first envisioned "a train that would span a continent, running on a continuous ribbon of metal for more than 1,500 miles," as E. H. Cookridge writes in Orient Express: The Life and Times of the World's Most Famous Train. During a trip to America, Nagelmackers witnessed the many innovations in railway travel there—chief among them George Pullman's unprecedented, luxurious "sleeper cars"—and he returned determined to realize his vision.
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