From Paris to Beijing by train? At the World’s Fair in April 1900, it only took 45 minutes. The visitors were seated in an original luxury wagon of the “Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits”, waiters in Tatar costume served caviar and champagne, and the Russian landscape flew past the window, on passing panorama screens.
Impresario Georges Nagelmackers hoped that anyone who had experienced this spectacle would support his latest project, the “Train Transsibérien”. Hadn’t he already proved that he was capable of linking worlds?
It is a fascinating story that the novelist and screenwriter Gerhard J. Rekel discovered: Who knows Georges Nagelmackers, the Belgian entrepreneur and inventor of the Orient Express, born in 1845 as the son of a banker near Liège? As a young man, he became acquainted with the Pullman sleeping car on a trip to the USA and decided to cover Europe with a network of sleeping car lines.
In his biography, the first of the Nagelmackers, Rekel describes the highly eventful life of the perfectionist engineer and entrepreneur as a succession of terrible mishaps and grandiose successes in a novel-like way. Rekel has already presented Nagelmackers’ story on film for the ZDF documentary series Terra X and attractively illustrated the book with contemporary photos and advertising posters.
Georges Nagelmackers’ most famous project, having started in 1873 with a single trailer carriage between Vienna and Munich and thereafter establishing sleeper car lines between Paris and Vienna and other European cities, was the Orient Express.
To connect West and East without having to change trains and stay in hotels, and with the greatest luxury and in the best of company: that was his goal.
The story of the premiere trip to Constantinople, to which the Nagelmackers invited a whole bunch of journalists in 1883, is breathtaking. They should make the Orient Express known to the world, nothing could go wrong. And yes, the critical companions from the “Times” and the “Münchner Allgemeine Zeitung” were very happy to be spoiled by the exquisite cuisine – everything was freshly cooked, the chickens in Strasbourg were loaded alive.
Nagelmackers feared the worst when the gentlemen and two ladies unexpectedly walked soaked to the castle of the King of Romania and had to wait between beggars and sheep in the Bulgarian port of Varda.
But travelers were enthralled by the luxury of the Nagelmackers-designed carriages and the novel experience. “The Orient Express is a revolution in the art of travel,” headlines the Times. From 1889 the journey from Paris to Constantinople took only 67 hours, initially around 80.
At the height of its success, the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits operated 180 sleeping car lines across Europe and beyond, employing 6,250 people. Nagelmackers also opened travel agencies – one of them incidentally at Unter den Linden 67 – and grand hotels in Constantinople, Cairo and Paris, generously invited politicians and business people to parties at his palace.
With that, however, he overreached himself. From 1896 the company started making more and more losses, and the supervisory board and banks put pressure on him. Eventually his power of attorney was withdrawn, he developed health problems and died at the age of 60.
Today one would wish for such a network of sleeping car lines. Incidentally, Nagelmackers’ project of the Trans-Siberian train Paris-Beijing was not crowned with success during his lifetime; the Boxer Rebellion destabilized China and made the country unattractive to travelers. Connecting worlds is, as can be seen again today, a very shaky affair.
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