The murder of the Orient Express
13 April 1977
On 20 May the Orient Express will pull out of the Gare de Lyon on its last trip to Istanbul. The train has been a dramatic gift to novelists and film-makers, and is established in everyone’s mind as one of the great glamorous railway journeys of the world. Now it is to be scrapped.
If Agatha Christie, Graham Greene and Ian Fleming ever travelled on the Orient Express, they no doubt used the excellent Wagons Lit sleeper, which cocoons you in luxury for 56 hours or more and deposits you refreshed, if somewhat bored, at Sirkeci station on the shores of the Bosphorus. But the sleeper coach only runs twice a week, it is more expensive than the airfare, and there is no dining car. The other five days a week this famous train is no more than a sad-looking second class through coach tacked on to a train with coaches bound for Switzerland, Italy and Greece.
Colonial officials going to and from India and Egypt made small talk with society ladies on the grand tour in coaches like Victorian drawing rooms. Today, the train is prone to breakdowns, doors fail to close, toilets stink and it is frequently hours late.
The Direct Orient as the train is now called is an embarrassment to French Railways. The clerk at their office in London sucks his teeth, shakes his head and says: “No sir, I can’t recommend it. It’s a hardship trip. You’ll need three days supply of food and water.” You can force them to sell you a ticket if you must and turn up at the Gare-de-Lyon any night.
At the end of the platform, out in the rain beyond the glow of the fluorescent lights there is a dull green coach already littered with cigarette ends and rapidly filling up with homeward bound Turkish and Yugoslav workers. They appear to be loading their entire homes in through the open windows of the train. They then install themselves over as many seats as possible, spreading out their possessions to try to discourage others. The experienced travellers can be distinguished by their plastic jerry cans of water, loaves of bread, and carpet slippers.
The announcer drones out the names of the calling places –Venice, Belgrade, Sofia, Istanbul – as the train leaves at seven minutes to midnight. By the middle of the next day the train is deep into northern Italy. On the Direct Orient coach there are two Americans disembarking at Venice, a well-scrubbed English girl off to India to do good works, her Indian boyfriend with an impeccable Oxbridge accent who also hopes to find work in India, and another Indian who is on his way home after working for 12 years in psychiatric medicine in Southend-on-Sea.
Those fearsome Turks with unshaven walnut faces who looked in Paris as if they were ready to rob you as you slept have turned into real people who converse in pidgin English, French, and German. They insist on sharing their fruit, savoury pancakes, and searing petroleum-tasting liquor on which we get steadily inebriated. One of them has a tape recorder playing casbah-like music.
At Trieste, even before the train halts our cosy community is invaded by a shoving mass of humanity climbing in through the doors and windows laden with parcels and bags and not put off by our attempts to spread ourselves over the seats. We are witnessing the last leg of a marathon 48-hour duty dodging spree by what seems to be most of the population of Yugoslavia.
They board the west bound train in Belgrade and travel in congested discomfort overnight to Trieste, the first step in Italy. There they spend the day shopping in the market where prices are marked in both liras and dinars. Then they catch the east-bound train back, spending a second uncomfortable night and risking a hair-raising customs check at the border. They sort out their booty and begin hiding it under the seats and ask foreign passport holders to carry parcels for them; but the contraband they have is not diamonds, drugs, or secret plans, it is blue jeans.
At the border station in the early hours of the morning we are ordered off the train to stand on the track. They have found a cache of contraband jeans in another compartment and are about to make a melodramatic example. We stand on the snow covered track with a strong floodlight beating down from the wooden customs building. The Yugoslav customs men have taken off their jackets and are rummaging in a compartment of the huge train that looms above us. A window opens and one by one scores of pairs of jeans sail through the open window and fall like dead birds at our feet. Then they lead away a sullen youth. As the train moves off other travellers jubilantly rescue items of clothing from their hiding places.
The train moves across Bulgaria towards the end of the second day and I am down to the last tin of Sainsbury’s corned beef washed down with a bottle of water filled from the dribbling tap on the platform at Dimitrovgrad.
The refreshments on the train consist of private enterprise coffee-making by the occasional conductor, a trolley on the platform at Belgrade which offered hard-boiled eggs and loaves of bread, and another man who came through the train with a crate of beer on wheels somewhere in Yugoslavia (a little different to Agatha Christie’s Princess Dragomiroff in Murder on the Orient Express. She orders from a respectful attendant mineral water, orange juice, chicken cooked without sauces, and some boiled fish).
The Turks predict we will be five hours late, as usual, at Istanbul. In fact we arrive four hours late after trundling through the bathing resorts on the Sea of Marmara, past open-air village markets lining muddy roads. What is left of our food is scattered to the chickens and dogs which loiter beside the train at every halt.
There are now three goods trucks linked to the back of the train with yellow tractors riding on them. We have become a local, stopping at every station, until the engine breaks down. A man attacks it with a spanner and we move on to the next stop, and there we wait for 39 minutes until another is attached for the last run in to Istanbul. We pass the minarets of the Blue Mosque, the high walls of Topkapi Palace, and a signal box with the sign “Istanbul”.
