French rail operator SNCF has spent more than £12 million painstakingly restoring an iconic train of the Orient Express, as it considers fully relaunching the fabled service to the East.
The last true Orient Express travelled from Paris to Istanbul in 1977, drawing the curtain on almost a century of taking travellers on the fabled route from western Europe to the shores of the Bosphorus in Turkey.
The train also entered popular culture, playing a central role in celebrated books and movies, not least Agatha Christie’s 1930s novel ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ which has inspired several films.
SNCF has spent seven years to restore the train with precision, scrutinising the original plans and using the best replicas of every fibre of the old carriages, to put on its exhibition in Paris.
The brand name was acquired by French rail operator SNCF and it is currently exhibiting seven original carriages at Gare de l’Est station.
“To restore them, we went into our archives to find the original plans or samples of tissues and so forth,” said Guillaume de Saint Lager, the executive director of Orient Express.
For SNCF chief executive Guillaume Pepy the display at the Gare de l’Est could be the start of a new beginning for the Orient Express.
“It is clearly a big investment, some 14 million euros (£12.2 million), but it is an investment in railway heritage,” said Pepy.
“They are a shop window for the expertise of the SNCF in preserving heritage.”
After intense research, the SNCF found historic Orient Express carriages in a siding in Poland close to the border with Belarus and can now boast a set of 16 carriages – including 9 sleeping cars and four saloons.
SNCF last year sold 50.1 percent in the company holding the rights to the Orient Express brand to French hotel group Accor, which wants to open luxury hotels under the name.
Meanwhile the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express – a privately owned luxury train first established by an American entrepreneur in the 1980s – currently plies a route between Calais in northern France, Paris, Verona and Venice in Italy.
An exhibition at Paris’ Museum of the Arab World in 2014 on the Orient Express proved a smash hit and encouraged SNCF to restore the carriages.
“Our aim is to have the Orient Express on the rails all around Europe,” said Pepy.
But whether a re-launched Orient Express will again steam between Paris and Istanbul remains to be seen.
“We need to look at the state of the carriages and see under what conditions they could travel again and how they could be brought in line with the security specifications that exist in Europe,” Pepy said.
“We are doing the technical work now and hope we can have a positive decision this summer,” he added.