A brief history of luxury rail travel

In 1857, American inventor George Mortimer Pullman saw a gap in the burgeoning American rail market waiting to be filled – a more comfortable way to travel – and went about founding the Pullman Palace Car Company.

Pullman’s Pioneer sleeping car was the private jet of its day, pairing black walnut interiors with rococo murals and chandeliers, and dining cars styled like Fifth Avenue restaurants that served up sugar-cured ham and fried oysters. By 1867 – a decade later – his 50 sleeping cars had become the upper crust’s preferred method of zipping across America.

Around the same time, a wealthy young Belgian, Georges Nagelmackers, came across Pullman’s luxurious sleeping cars while railroading across America. Hoping the palatial Pullman carriages could translate to Europe’s growing network – which stretched from Stockholm to Naples and from Krakow to Cadiz – he founded the equally prosaic Compagnie Internationale des WagonsLits – the International Sleeping-Car Company. By 1883, his Express d’Orient was ferrying diplomats, sultans and spies (not to mentionLeo Tolstoy, Lawrence of Arabia and Mata Hari) between Paris and Istanbul. Later renamed the Orient Express, this iconic train inspired countless others, including Le Train Bleu, which conveyed a boozy Churchill from Calais to the French Riviera. (Restored carriages are now operated by Belmond’s Venice-Simplon Orient Express, which has a new Paris to Portofino tour this June.)

But the sleeping car’s golden days were numbered. Soon, along came the jet age, and soon after that the closing of borders (passengers on the original Orient Express had little patience for passport checks). The nail in the coffin came in the 1970s, when Amtrak took over America’s gilded trains and replaced them with… a different sort of train travel. Over the last two decades, a light has appeared at the end of the tunnel as a new era of sleepers – from the Ghan in Australia to the Nightjet for Zurich – gradually put the industry back on track. With airport chaos and rising prices, the jet age lustre may be dwindling, clearing the platform for a second golden age of rail.

Another world: the interior of a Pullman car circa 1870