In 1882, guests aboard a test run from Paris to Vienna ate oysters, turbot, chicken chasseur and fillet of beef while traveling at 40 miles an hour. This episode profiles Georges Nagelmackers, the Belgian banker's son who founded the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits and built luxury carriages without owning a single locomotive or inch of track. We explain how pivoting bogie wheels kept the soup in the bowls, and why the first Orient Express of 1883 actually dumped passengers in Romania for a ferry, a local train and a 15-hour Black Sea steamship before a direct Paris to Constantinople route arrived in 1889.

From there we follow the train through the suspension of 1914, the post-war Simplon Orient Express that deliberately bypassed Austria and Germany through an Alpine tunnel, the 1930s golden age with three parallel routes, wartime  ...