R.I.P. Orient Express

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  08.25.09 | 10:09 AM ET

Don’t worry: The modern, private luxury line to Venice is still going strong. But, as we’ve noted before, the last true descendant of the original Orient Express was a line from Strasbourg to Vienna—and that service has just been cut. The Independent’s Simon Calder offers an obituary:

As an announcement of a momentous death foretold, it is remarkably economical. “Train 468/469,” reports the September edition of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable “Strasbourg to Wien [Vienna] will finally be withdrawn.” Between those two phrases is the most momentous pair of words in European rail travel: Orient Express. Seventy-five years after the publication of Agatha Christie’s bestselling crime novel, Murder on the Orient Express, the train that epitomised trans-European travel for more than a century is finally being killed off.

Tags: R.I.P., Train Travel, Europe, News and Briefs

Eva Holland is the senior editor of World Hum. Her writing has also appeared in Reader's Digest Canada, NationalGeographic.com, the National Post, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen and WestJet's Up! Magazine, among other publications. She's based in Canada's Yukon territory.


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