Orient Express Venice Simplon Train Blue Luggage label Never Used Venice. A seething tidal wave of humanity, disgorged from a conga line of grimy commuter trains and long distance expresses. Families. Old women. Pickpockets and cafes filled to overflowing with the tired, the tense and the plain excited. All human life under one vast canopy, and then some. Your ears catch the sudden refrain of a string quartet, swinging lushly through some half remembered Strauss waltz, fighting with the pigeons for air space. A mad rush of porters, over stacked luggage carts, and lines outside the left luggage store that resembles a refugee column. The pace is frantic. And suddenly, there it is. The Orient Express….. Seventeen gleaming, dark blue carriages, stretching for a full quarter of a mile. A glistening, glamorous rake without equal. The Ritz on wheels. Each carriage adorned with the gold seal of the company. Above the opened windows along each promenade, brilliantly burnished brass lettering bears the same ancient, proud logo. COMPAGNIE INTERNATIONALE DES WAGON LITS, ET DES GRANDES EXPRESS EUROPEENS Of course it is instant, dramatic theatre; the curtain raiser to an epic journey across five frontiers, and through nine hundred miles of Europe’s most splendid, alluring scenery. The Dolomites. The Brenner Pass. Innsbruck, Zurich and Paris will pass by like so many stunning drum rolls, until the final procession through the fields of Kent, and the ultimate landfall in London, some thirty-one hours after leaving here. All is orderly, carefully orchestrated angst. The train manager, in his immaculate coat and tails, distributes cabin assignments and makes dinner reservations for the well heeled throng that tries so hard to look casually unimpressed at the vision in front of them. The first passengers on board lounge casually against the half open promenade windows, looking back at the sea of open mouths pressed against the grimy windows of the commuter train on the opposite platform. There is the subtle pop of a champagne cork, and the sound of a child crying somewhere down the platform. Unfazed, the string quartet swings into The Blue Danube as a woman wrapped in a cloud of Chanel sweeps pasts them, while her husband arranges for bellhops to take their luggage to the baggage car. His wife is carrying a tiny handbag worth the entire national debt of a small third world country. Gradually, the maelstrom and the madness clears like early morning mist. The chefs in their uniform whites wave away the unwanted fresh produce deemed not good enough. Passengers board the Orient Express, the theatre on wheels that will whisk them effortlessly across the ancient continent. Train doors click smartly shut, one after another. The small, perfectly formed Art Deco fastness of the train is now hermetically sealed from such mundane concerns as pickpockets, pigeons and avaricious porters. Reality has been left locked up in the baggage hold. There is a moment’s silence that seems to last a lifetime. It hangs as heavy as damask curtains, until the single, strident scream of a guard’s whistle splits the air like a brick thrown through a frosted glass window. The ghost of another pause. Then the whole length of the great train gives a barely perceptible shudder; it fills the souls of those on board with a sense of delight that runs up from the very toes. Then the Orient Express gathers way; a slow, beautifully coiffed colossus, swaggering in a grand, matchless style, out and away from the most stunning sea city the world. Carnevale on wheels. A fantasy island, running just as surely on its own sense of style, history and legend as much as any railway track. It is summer in Venice, and another northbound run is under way.