Orient Express

Railway glamor such as even the 20th Century Limited never knew has ridden for half a century, still rides the Orient Express. For every tycoon deposited in Chicago and for every cinemactress brought to Broadway by the New York Central's famed train, the Orient Express has carried its kings, its Kreugers, its peacock Balkan generals and as many spies as frontier guards can be bribed to pass between Europe proper and Asia improper on the musty, rattle-banging train de luxe. There are also German travelers, omnivorous, industrious and good at figuring out. as one did recently, that on the Orient Express substantially the same dinner cost in:

Italy $2.60

France 2.40

Germany 2.00

Czechoslovakia 1.75

Austria 1.60

Yugoslavia 1.40

Hungary 1.25

Turkey 1.20

Rumania .90

Greece .65

In the special express car of the Orient Express, a service which cuts shipping time for packages across the Balkans from weeks to hours, everything has been carried, from a coffin crammed with counterfeit banknotes to a notorious suede moneybag containing only a Moslem potentate knew what. Every threat of Balkan war, every komitadji bandit raid near the steel rails, every chronic Bulgarian earth tremor means costly problems to the trilingual Frenchmen in creased, drab uniforms who somehow always get the Orient Express through.

Month ago Yugoslavian editors flayed Hollywood for misrepresenting the Balkans' trains de luxe in the cinema Orient Express, scare-headed AMERICAN FILM LIES ABOUT YUGOSLAVIA (TIME, April 1). Last week the Yugoslavian Government suppressed as long as possible a secret which finally leaked out: for the first time any Yugoslav could remember since the War, the mail car of the Orient Express had been robbed.

A favorite sport of Balkan pickpockets is to steal upon the Orient Express at night stops, fish passengers' baggage expertly from open windows with long hooks. Such thefts are counted among the common risks of mid-European travel, but to rob the mail car of the Orient Express is different. In Belgrade sly winks were tipped. Yugoslavs suspected their own government of wanting something out of the Orient Express mail car and getting it.

As the Orient was approaching Zagreb, six masked men ducked from a vestibule into the mail car, trussed its French guardian, locked him in the cabinet, and methodically went through eleven sacks of mail. What, if anything, they abstracted remained a mystery. When the Orient reached Zagreb the Frenchman kicked loose, raised an alarm, but the bandits had vanished.

A Belgian named George Nagelmackers visited the U. S. in the 1860's, purchased the patent of the Mann Railway Sleeping Car Carriage, precursor of Puliman. In Brussels he founded what is now La Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Europeens (The International Company of Sleeping Cars and of Great European Expresses). This firm, called Wagons-Lits for short, not only supplies individual dining and sleeping cars to European railways, much as Pullman does to U. S. railways, but also makes up entire trains (except the locomotives), and arranges with a score of governments to run them uninterruptedly across Europe and Asia. Longest (preWar) run under Wagons-Lits auspices was Paris-Berlin-Moscow-Irkutsk-Yladivostok. 7,800 miles. Bolsheviks stole all Wagons-Lits cars on which they could lay their hands, and still operate them. Germany operates more of her own sleeping cars than any other continental power. But Wagons-Lits expresses such as the "Nord Express" roar nightly over the Paris-Berlin-Riga route.

Most luxurious of all Wagons-Lits trains are now its all-steel, so-called ''Pullmans," sumptuous sitting-room cars with chairs and tables, first introduced on the Paris-London Golden Arrow. But to Europeans the train of glamor remains the Orient Express, weathered and creaky though many of its sleepers are.

By 'The Orient Express" most Europeans mean loosely any one of several interconnecting trains which link Paris and Berlin with Athens, Istanbul and Bucharest across a middle zone comprising Vienna, Venice, Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia. Of these interconnecting Grands Express the most typical is the Simplon Orient Express on which it costs $171 First Class and $121 Second (there is no third) to span the 1.886 miles between Paris and Istanbul in 2 1/2 days. Including all stops and fooling around at eight frontiers, the Simplon Orient nonetheless averages 30 m.p.h.

Through travelers hand their passports to the French porter, are seldom disturbed by frontier passport control officers except for a quick glance, or occasionally at night a rap on the compartment door and the stab of a flashlight. If suspected of being a spy, the thing to do is to raise a terrific hubbub and demand that the express be held while you telegraph the nearest U. S. Legation which in the Balkans will reply faster than you would think. Usually the express will wait.

Seven years ago Wagons-Lits bought Thomas Cook & Son with the result that on the Orient Express one can now escape the necessity of paying for things in seven kinds of money. Buying ticket and meal coupons or books in Paris at Wagons-Lits-Cook's opposite the Madeleine, you hop a taxi to the smoky Gare du Nord, step aboard the Simplon Orient at 5:53 p. m.. wake up next morning just as you are diving under the Alps through the famed Simplon Tunnel and breakfast as you swish by the Italian lakes and Stresa.

Milan is passed by midmorning. Venice as you top off luncheon with coffee and liqueurs; Trieste for tea, then the long run through Yugoslavia with Zagreb at midnight and Belgrade, the capital, for second-day-out-breakfast. Just before high-noon you are at Nish, parting of the ways, where the Simplon Orient splits into two sections. To the right and it is Salonika at bedtime, and Athens at 10:15 a. m. To the left and you are at Sofia for tea, and Istanbul in the misty Turkish dawn at 7:47 a. m.

If you are still bound East, your sleeping car does not enter Istanbul Station but is switched off to the rim of the Golden Horn. There the only swank ship in sight waits to ferry Wagons-Lits passengers (and no one else; over to President Kemal's gleaming, modernistic Hadair-pasha Station where New Asia begins. On the platform stands the Anatolic Express --same de luxe sleeping cars as on the Simplon Orient but much newer. On the destination board is Dictator Kemal's proud whimsy, leading Turks of the hinterland to imagine that this same train has run clear through from England: "Anatolic Express: Londres, Paris, Ankara."

If you are going farther south, the board reads Taurus Express. In this you can take a shower bath as you enter the Holy Land, then make short bus connections to the railways now sprouting from Baghdad. Damascus and even Persia's capital. Teheran. In six days, entirely on land except for crossing the Golden Horn, you may speed 3,490 miles from Paris via the Holy Land to Cairo.

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