Orient Express

“ It has been justly said that the East begins on the other side of Vienna, but, out of deference to the susceptibilities of the Magyars, who consider themselves in the van of civilisation, the Orient Express affects to be extremely European during its transit through Hungary. It bustles and shakes, and is very uncomfortable. In Servia it is more at its ease, though it still makes a pretence of thinking that time is money by only stopping ten minutes at every station. ”

“ We're going forward with our shuttle flights, we're going forward to build our space station, and we are going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours. ”

“ The ordinary trains are only two hours slower than the Orient Express; they are equally well equipped, run every day and the charge is only about one-half as much.
Bulgaria has several railroads, running to the Black Sea, to Bucharest and to Salonika on the Mediterranean, in addition to the trunk line to Constantinople. They belong to the government, and seem to be well managed, although they make very slow time. The Orient Express sometimes works up a speed of twenty miles an hour, but averages about eighteen, and that is considered remarkable. ”

“ Somewhere in Bulgaria on the way to London.
April 14th, 1893.
DEAR MOTHER:
Tuesday I wrote you a letter in the club at Constantinople telling you how glad I would be to get out of that City on April 17th on the Orient Express which only leaves twice a week on Thursdays and Mondays. So any one who travels by the Orient is looked upon first as a millionaire and second, if he does not break the journey at Vienna, as a greater traveller than Col. Burnaby on his way to Khiva. Imagine a Kansas City man breaking the journey to New York. ”

“ One of these is the route of the Orient Express, which goes by Calais, Paris and Strassburg, then east of Strassburg runs north in the Rhine valley for about 40 m. to Karlsruhe, then winds through the hilly country between the Black Forest proper and the Odenwald to Stuttgart, proceeding thence by Ulm, Augsburg and Munich to Linz and then by the valley of the Danube through Vienna and Budapest to Belgrade, and thence by the valleys of the Morava, Nishava and Maritza to Constantinople. ”

“ The building of these thousands of miles of railway and the assembling of them together under industrial truce has been the product of a giant game in commerce, a commerce not to be confined wholly by the limits of this continent. The great ships built for the Orient are now an old story, an accepted enterprise that spells Europe on the one hand and Asia on the other. ”

“ We knew no reason why we should not take the train of our choice. It was true that our guide urged us to go by the night express. It was also true, when I presented my passport to the ticket agent at the railway station, the day before, and requested tickets, that he advised us to make the journey by the night express, nor would he at first agree to sell us tickets by the Imperial Mail, but told us to come back again two hours later, when he would let us know whether there were any berths [Pg 159] unsold in the train’s through sleeper. ”

“ An accommodation train has the verve of life which the conventions of a through express stifle; but whether it be a New England local with bird cages, or the Italian misti with priests and snuff boxes, nursing madonnas, garlic sandwiches, and chianti bottles, or the stifling wooden boxes of Northern India crowded with Afridi and Babus, no train in all the world is as domestic as the Japanese kisha. ”

“ A railway here in Asia—in the dreamy realm of the Orient—in the fabled land of the Arabian Nights—is a strange thing to think of. And yet they have one already, and are building another. The present one is well built and well conducted, by an English Company, but is not doing an immense amount of business. ”

“ The increasing demands of trade and the need of rapid communication make the construction of railways in Asia as necessary as in other parts of the world, but the lover of the picturesque will hope that the time will never come when the locomotive will entirely displace the camel, which seems to be an essential feature in every eastern landscape. This thought comes to me with special insistence as the shriek of the railway whistle announces our arrival at Aleppo, where a train of cars—in place of a caravan of camels—appears to be as incongruous as at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem. ”

“ After waiting for an hour in the restaurant, where a party of the attendants were playing cards, the ticket office was opened, but they absolutely refused to sell tickets to us, saying that the express only stopped for half a minute, and that we could not get into it. We vainly protested that having no registered luggage we would take our chance of getting into the train, and that we must go by it, as we had the long journey to Irkutsk before us. ”

“ It goes without saying that trains in the tropics do not carry you along as quickly as the Flying Dutchman or the Scotch express. But I found the carriages comfortable enough, being built in the American fashion, and furnished with Venetians to keep out the sun and let in the air. Except the station-masters, all the officials were Chinese or Javan natives. The guard who looked at my ticket wore the traditional peaked cap and cloth uniform, but over his European garments he had appended as usual his airy native costume. ”

“ In the “Orient,” the old-fashioned coal-fire heating in every carriage is still in vogue, and consequently the person who is unfortunate enough to have a berth near the stove is half roasted, while he who is at the farther end is half frozen. The traveller who goes East would certainly welcome the up-to-date wagons-lits of the Mediterranean or Carlsbad Expresses.
I travelled in the “Orient” from Paris to Vienna, from Belgrade to Sofia, from Bucharest to Constantza, and from Nisch in Servia to Paris, and on each of the trains were the same defects in sleeping comfort, and often in food. ”

“ Passengers, goods of high cost, and bills of exchange, move on the shortest and quickest lines of travel. No business man takes the way-train in preference to the express. Sailing vessels make the voyage from Puget Sound to Shanghai in from thirty to forty days. Steamers will make it in twenty.
TRADE WITH ASIA.
Far-seeing men in England are looking forward to the time when the trade between that country and the Pacific will be carried on across this continent. ”

“ But beyond the Urals we are once more lost in the desolate plains across which the train crawls softly and silently at the rate of about ten miles an hour. I know of only one slower railway in the world, that from Jaffa to Jerusalem, where I have seen children leap on and off the car-steps of the train while in motion, and the driver alight, without actually stopping his engine, to gather wildflowers! We cross the great Obi and Yenisei rivers over magnificent bridges of iron and Finnish granite, which cost millions of roubles to construct. ”

“ I love the landing on the friendly shores of France, the waiting while the ship is reluctantly coaxed sidling up to the pier, the hustle to get through the custom-house and enter the warm, well-lit train. The foreign tongue is delightful to the ear: so, too, to the eye, the blue-bloused porters, and the unplatformed station, where the huge carriages tower high above one, emitting mysterious jets of steam. ”

“ The railway will before long arrive at Erivan, and then the pilgrimage will be still easier to undertake. Not all the tourists in the world will disturb the harmony of this landscape; the screeching trains, the loud hotels, the Babel of tongues will be lost, like a flight of starlings, in this expanse. It is here that the spirit of Asia is most intensely present—an inner sanctuary to those outer courts through which the traveller may have wandered and never crossed the threshold of this plain. ”

“ One express train steamed up to London 118 miles in an hour-and-a-half, nearly 80 miles an hour. An established company having refused an express train to the promoters of a rival scheme, the latter employed persons to get up a mock funeral cortege, and engage an express train to convey it to London; they did so, and the plans and sections came in the hearse, with solicitors and surveyors as mourners! ”

“ During these pauses the fret and jar of the labouring train gave place to a babel of voices—shouting, expostulating, denunciating in every conceivable key. For the third-class passenger in the East is nothing if not vociferous, and the itch of travel has penetrated even to these outskirts of empire. ”

“ Perhaps, however, at no distant day this trade may be much more than re-established by the construction of a railway from some point on the west coast of the Mediterranean, such as Sidon or Gaza, or Port Said, viâ Damascus, to Bagdad and the Persian Gulf. [10] The ground seems nearly level almost the entire distance, and there would certainly be very little private property of any value on the line. By this means Central Asia would be opened up to commerce and Christianity, the great civilizers, and I believe the shortest practicable route to India and the East obtained. ”

“ Turcomans, Kirghese, Persians, Armenians, and Jews, and I don't know how many other races and kinds of people. There is a good deal of commerce, mostly in the hands of Armenians and Russians, but much less than when the railway terminated here. The business of Merv and the Penjdeh district is at the end of the railway; in this respect the commerce of Central Asia is much like that of our far-western country, and changes its base with each change of the means of transport. ”

“ This train is brand new, Pullman built, and provides an observation and dining car service equal to anything in the United States. It makes but few stops and fast time.
The Eastern traveler who has never been in the West will be surprised beyond measure at the character of these trains, the train service, including particularly, perhaps, the dining and observation cars, the rapid time made on such long runs, and the excellence of the roadbed, which is rock and gravel ballasted. ”

“ During the week in which I was at Bokhara and Samarkand work was begun on the new railway which is to run from Tashkent to Kuldzha, in Chinese Tartary, and in a little while, perhaps, we may see an agreement made and work begun in the construction of the railway to India through Persia. Russia, stopped in the Far East by the emergence of modern Japan, and thwarted in the Balkans, seemed in the time just before the Great War to be concentrating her attention on what may be called the Middle East. How open Europe [57] is becoming to the East, and how easy of access is the East becoming to us! ”

“ A native stationmaster lost half our luggage for us—vowed he'd put it on board. I knew that he knew that he had not done so, but I could do nothing. It was glaringly hot at the station; several Europeans wore black spectacles, and I had to do the same, for needle like pains ran through my eyes since the day on the snipe jheel at Bhamo.
The first part of the journey was smooth enough, but bless me! they brought up the Royal train from Rangoon at ten miles an hour faster than we travel down! How uneasily must have lain a head that is to wear a crown. ”

“ The whole of Asiatic Russia enjoys the benefits of the posting system, and one may go by the government roads to the shores of the Arctic ocean in the north, or to the country of the Kirghes and Turcomans on the south. Whenever a new region in Central Asia is conquered and brought under the Russian rule, a post route is opened and stations are established, so as to afford certain and quick communication. The post route is to Russia what the railway is to the United States in developing new territory, and carrying to it the blessings, as well as the curses, of civilization. ”

“ It is a great convenience that passengers can take so much luggage in the carriage without inconvenience. In the Russian State Express there is not nearly so much accommodation as in the International Sleeping Cars, where there is a large recess over the door, extending above the corridor, in which there was ample room for two suit cases and two bags of bedding. ”

“ The intelligent English traveller, in this fortunate age for him, is aware that, half-way between Boulogne and Paris, there is a complex railway-station, into which his train, in its relaxing speed, rolls him with many more than the average number of bangs and bumps prepared, in the access of every important French gare, to startle the drowsy or distrait passenger into a sense of his situation. ”

“ Almost the only people who make what are called “long trips” in Europe, that is, ten or twelve hours, are American and English tourists, and they are given a shadow of American comfort on certain first-class trains, for which [268] they pay right well. For example, Mrs. Morgan and I wanted to take the night train from Paris to Marseilles, twelve hours’ ride. One train carried a sleeping-car. It left Paris at 9 o’clock at night and reached Marseilles at 9 o’clock the next morning. Only passengers with first-class tickets can ride on it. ”

“ Like sheep, the passengers are driven from the train in which not so much as a newspaper is left. Only the sleeping-car is allowed to go through, but it is emptied and searched. The travellers are penned within a large room where the luggage is inspected, and they are deprived of their passports. When the customs formalities are over they are allowed to find the refreshment-room, and there console themselves with weak tea in tumblers until such time as they are released. ”