A Rail Romance

The Orient Express has rolled into Gardens by the Bay. We piece together the history and glamour of the legendary train to help you make the most of this unique exhibition

- Juliana Chan

What is all the fuss over a couple of musty old train cars? Plenty, in the case of the Orient Express. Apart from the sheer depth and scale of art and technical restoration, or even the massive logistics and red tape involved in bringing it from France to Singapore, there’s a treasure trove of history and glamour that surrounds the famous train service that first ran between Paris and Constantinople (now Istanbul) and later extended south to cover Egypt and expanded towards Asia. The Orient Express effectively bridged the East and West in the second half of the 19th century.

Game Changer

One needs to remember that the train came into existence at a time before aviation technology and travel as we know it today. Without modern tunnelling expertise, laboriously laid railway tracks meandered through valleys, plateaus and mountain passes. They were a massive undertaking that spanned across Europe and into the Middle East, and marked the beginning of high-speed transportation. And indeed, all manner of important overland political and diplomatic connections had to be made via rail.

Although rail travel was the prevalent means of long-distance transport, the Orient Express became a game-changer by the fact that it made travelling those distances infinitely more comfortable with the introduction of sleeping cars. These made perfect sense, of course, since passengers typically had to spend a number of days travelling. But back then, sleeping cars were the ultimate word on luxury travel, equivalent to first-class cabins in modern-day air travel.