The wild life of the Mr. Orient Express

Orient express

Such an Orient Express was Nagelmacker’s masterpiece in 1883. To this day, the name of the train stands for elegant travel on rails.

(Photo: Orient Express)

For a number of years, railway companies such as the Austrian Federal Railways have been promising us a renaissance of the sleeping car with their “Nightjets”: Let yourself be rocked through the night in a rolling hotel room, arrive at your destination rested the next morning and also travel climate-friendly – this promise sounds more tempting than it does ever.

But the modern night trains encounter problems very similar to those that a now almost forgotten railway pioneer had to deal with 150 years ago: Different technical standards and bureaucratic rules depending on the country make train journeys across borders complicated. And when the cars are supposed to offer real privacy, comparatively few passengers fit in, which makes profitable operation difficult.

The Belgian Georges Nagelmackers was the first to overcome these hurdles and cover Europe with a network of luxury trains in the decades leading up to the First World War. The elite of the Belle Epoque could travel from Siberia to Lisbon and from St. Petersburg to Luxor in Egypt with Nagelmacker’s “Compagnie Internationale des Wagon Lits et des Grands Express Européens” (CIWL).

The Nagelmackers achieved their masterpiece with the “Orient Express” from Paris to Istanbul. To this day, the name of this train is synonymous with elegant rail travel, as well as romance and adventure: on the maiden voyage in 1883, the CIWL advised passengers to carry revolvers with them. But the first passengers on the Orient Express also enjoyed a spontaneous audience with the Romanian king.

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The filmmaker and author Gerhard Rekel tells us such key episodes in Nagelmacker’s life in the enjoyable style of a historical novel – without the biography lacking in accuracy. Rekel characterizes the Nagelmackers as a typical Schumpeterian pioneering entrepreneur: 150 years ago, railways were a market of the future, just like fast data networks or artificial intelligence are today.

Gerhard J. Rekel: Monsieur Orient Express
Kremayr & Scheriau
Vienna 2022
288 pages
25 euros

After the banker’s son got to know the first rather spartan sleeping cars on a trip to the USA, he absolutely wanted to bring this product to Europe – but with more comfort and a service like in the best grand hotels.

By focusing on the luxury segment, Nagelmackers avoided the problem of low capacity in its trains: CIWL’s elite customers paid almost any price if they were spared the rigors of a normal train journey. A trip in Nagelmacker’s sleeping car from Paris to Vienna in 1873 cost about as much as a worker earned in a year.

>> Read also: Sleepers instead of cheap flights: the night train business is growing

Nevertheless, the CIWL scraped along the edge of bankruptcy more than once. Like any true pioneering entrepreneur, Nagelmacker’s growth was more important than returns. He always wanted to build new sleeping, dining and saloon cars, run new trains and soon accommodate the passengers at their destinations in his own hotels. The atmosphere of the former CIWL hotels can still be felt in the legendary “Pera Palace” in Istanbul.

In Rekel’s book one also learns that the railway entrepreneur Nagelmackers won the gold medal in the archaic discipline of stagecoach racing at the 1900 Olympic Games of all things – the picture of the daredevil jack-of-all-trades seems perfect.

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But the biography makes it clear that Nagelmackers also owed his success to completely different qualities: for example, diplomatic skills in negotiations with the railway companies on whose tracks he had his trains run. In addition, empathy for the needs of passengers and business partners.

In private, Nagelmackers seems to have been a sensitive and polite gentleman. That doesn’t sound like an Elon Musk of the railroad.

Rekel’s clever and entertaining book shows that the criteria for great entrepreneurship have changed just as little over the past 150 years as the prerequisites for the successful operation of night trains.

More: Books of the Year: Favorites that are still worth reading in 2023

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