Parked in front of the Institut du monde arabe on the left bank of the Seine in Paris until the end of August, four carriages from the Orient Express that once crossed Europe from London to Istanbul have been opened to visitors as part of an exhibition, co-organised with French railways, on this famous route that allowed passengers to travel on direct from Istanbul to Baghdad and Cairo. Together with the carriages, painted in the blue and gold colours of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits that once ran the train, there is also a steam engine, gleaming as it presumably would rarely have done when it was in service, parked at right angles to the Institut's façade. As the accompanying exhibition explains, while the Orient Express had a reputation for luxury in its heyday after the First World War, it also played an important role in opening up the Arab world to European influence and tourism. The Orient Express was replaced by air travel after the Second World War, when train routes across Europe were disrupted by the division of the continent during the Cold War and train travel across the Middle East became difficult owing to political changes in the wake of the end of European colonial rule. However, during the few decades when the service flourished passengers were able to travel from London to Cairo or Baghdad by sleeping car, as the materials included in the exhibition explain. Celebrity travelers, such as the British novelist Agatha Christie on her way to join her husband archaeologist Max Mallowan on excavations in Iraq, regularly used the train. Artists were commissioned to decorate it, and writers and filmmakers used it as the setting for films and novels. The British novelist Graham Greene used the train in his novel Stamboul Train, published in 1932, which takes its characters from Ostend to the famous Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul. Two years later, Christie published her own Murder on the Orient Express, which begins with Belgian detective Hercule Poirot boarding the train in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Of the three renovated carriages open to visitors in the exhibition, the first is a 1929 saloon and dining car, lavishly decorated with specially commissioned wooden marquetry and glass panels by the French designer René Lalique, while the second is a 1949 sleeping car with 11 compartments of the type made famous by Christie in her 1934 novel. The last of the three is a 1929 bar car containing eight card tables (much time seems to have been spent playing bridge) and an upright piano. However, probably more memorable than the carriages themselves is the material included in the accompanying exhibition. This ranges widely over topics such as the development of rail networks in the Middle East, the fortunes of the tourism industry, and the appearance of high-end travel infrastructure in the shape of a network of luxury hotels. According to the exhibition, the Ottoman authorities before 1918, eager to open up the ailing Empire to outside investment and to improve communication links, commissioned French and British engineers to build railway lines across Ottoman territory from the 1850s onwards, concentrating at first on connections within Anatolia. Contracts were awarded to German companies from the 1890s onwards, with the famous Baghdad Railway commencing in 1903. At the same time, German engineers began the Hejaz Railway in 1900, reaching Medina by 1908. Jaffa and Jerusalem were linked by rail in 1892, with Rayak, Hama, Aleppo and Damascus being linked between 1902 and 1906. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the exhibition catalogue comments, “it was possible to go by train from London, Paris or Berlin to Aleppo, Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem and Medina, covering in two or three days distances which had previously taken weeks.” Meanwhile, the Egyptian rail network had been developing independently and at a faster speed. The first railway line in Africa and the Middle East was built in Egypt in 1853 between Cairo and Kafr al-Zayyat, extended to Alexandria in 1856. In 1858 Suez was linked by train to Cairo, followed by Assiut in 1874 and Luxor and Aswan in 1898. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, this railway network, now linked to that in the wider Middle East, was used for trains from the Taurus Express, the Middle East extension of the Orient Express, making it possible for passengers to travel direct from Paris to Cairo or Paris to Baghdad in the space of a week. Such new-found accessibility and speed could not help but stimulate the development of tourism. The magnificent Pera Palace Hotel, financed by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, opened its doors in Istanbul in 1897, and it was still an important port of call, though a rather faded one, for the characters of Stamboul Train in 1932. In Murder on the Orient Express, Poirot stays at the city's equally resonant Tokatlian Hotel, which opened in 1897. Egypt's grand hotels, Shepheard's in Cairo, the Winter Palace in Luxor and the Cataract in Aswan, dating from much the same period, also benefitted from the new traffic brought in by the railway passengers, with Shepheard's in particular targeting travelers arriving in Cairo by train. The Orient Express itself was modelled on the American Pullman trains that its original developer, Belgian businessman Georges Nagelmackers, had seen on a visit to the US in 1870. Such trains, used to open up the vast spaces of the North American continent, could play a similar role in Europe, he reasoned, particularly if properly marketed and accompanied by an appropriate media campaign. The train's first journey took place in 1883, when it was accompanied by journalists from the European media. By 1889, the trip from Paris to Istanbul had been brought down to 67 hours, with travelers arriving at the city's Sirkeci Station in the European side of the city before taking a ferry to the Asian side to the Haydarpasa Station for the onward trip. Writing in the exhibition catalogue, Jack Lang, president of the Institut du monde arabe, describes the Orient Express as “an intellectual adventure,” the railway having “enhanced relationships between East and West.” While it is unlikely that Middle Eastern train travel will once again play the role that it did in the early decades of the last century during the heyday of the Orient Express, it may be that the future of travel in the region nevertheless belongs to the train. Goods trains now routinely travel across Asia from China to Europe in 16 days, shaving weeks off sea routes and linking Shanghai to German industrial cities in the Ruhr. It may be that similar overland travel links will in future be developed between Europe and the Middle East. As one of the contributors to the present exhibition catalogue notes, “Turkey has been developing its high-speed train network, and since October 2013 a railway tunnel beneath the Bosphorus has directly linked the European and Asian continents. When will we once again see train travel from Paris to Baghdad and from Paris to Damascus, Beirut, Tripoli and Cairo via Aleppo,” he asks. Il était une fois l'orient express, Institut du monde arabe, Paris, until 31 August
