Georges Lambert Casimir Nagelmackers traveled to the United States in 1867 to cure a sentimental upset. He spent ten months there expanding his knowledge as an engineer and putting distance between himself and his past and his native Belgium. He returned in love with a new way of traveling: sleeping aboard the sleeper trains that Georges Pullman had created with his Pullman Palace Car Company.
Upon his return to Europe, this son of bankers and railroad workers well connected to King Leopold II, wanted to replicate the Pullman system for long train trips. Unlike the American, the Belgian gave a twist to the product: trips on the Georges Nagelmackers trains
Its star railway service was the Orient Express, launched in 1883 to travel from Paris to Vienna. It then spread to Venice and later to Istanbul, when it was still called Constantinople. It was a luxury train taken care of down to the smallest detail in decoration and service and became a legend due to the profile of its travelers and the stories, real or exaggerated, that it generated. The last regular service of the train, already very decaffeinated, was in 1977.
One of the least known facets of Nagelmackers was his participation in the 1900 Paris Olympic Games, where he won a gold medal in equestrian. The French capital was again Olympic for the round of 16 in 1924, and a century later, next July, it will host the Games again. This event of global attention towards Paris has motivated the French group Accor, current owner of the Orient Express brand, to recover it through the exhibition this summer in the French capital of a reconstruction of the legendary railway carriages.
Accor today manages 5,300 hotels and does so with 40 different labels: from the economical Ibis or F1 to the luxury ones such as Raffles, Fairmont, Sofitel and, now, Orient Express, which in addition to managing trains, will also be a brand of ultra-luxury hotels. The new division, which will launch in Italy this year with two establishments in Venice and Rome, will initially be directed by Giampaolo Ottazzi, former director of the Cipriani in Venice, of the Belmond group. The third Orient Express hotel will open in Riyadh in 2025 and work is already underway in London for the fourth, in addition to incorporating two hotels at the beginning and end of the historic line: Paris and Istanbul.
With these goals and an increasing demand for new luxury experiences, Accor has planned the recovery of a legendary train whose original carriages were rescued from a railway depot in Poland in a novel operation. Architect Maxime D'Angeac and a team of artisans have recovered the best of the details of ancient Lalique marquetry and glass.
Thus, the train will circulate again in 2025 through countries in central and eastern Europe. Another project on rails will be the one that will begin to circulate this year in Italy, and only on Italian territory: the Dolce Vita version of the Orient Express. In this case it is inspired by the style of Italy in the sixties, a meticulous work commissioned from Dimorstudio in Milan. The prices are at the height of great luxury: from 2,500 to 3,700 euros per person depending on the type of cabin. Those of the original Orient Express are still being defined, although they will go along this line.
