Description
The question everyone asks about my involvement with the train is ‘Were you a railway buff as a little boy?”. The answer is ‘No, but I am now!.
The first question is, of course, ‘Why did you do it?”. The Sea Containers Group made its first venture into the luxury hotel business in 1976 by purchasing the renowned Cipriani Hotel in Venice. Sea Containers wanted to acquire other leisure properties in Europe but found that many of the best known were ‘affairs of the heart’ and not of the pocket. When the last trip of the Orient-Express took place in May 1977 the world-wide publicity was enormous; this was followed by a Sotheby’s sale in Monte Carlo in October 1977 of five 1920s Orient-Express carriages which had been used in the film Murder on the Orient Express. I decided to attend the sale with the idea of picking up some bargains. The mob scene of press and TV which jammed the Monte Carlo railway goods depot that day convinced me that there was magic in the Orient-Express name. I bought two of the carriages and sent them to the Sea Containers depot in Bordeaux, France, where they were stored under cover for two years while the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express project was devised.
It took four and a half years from the date of the Monte Carlo sale to locate the rolling stock, learn how to restore it, negotiate the routing, engage the staff and promote the operation. The first run of the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express was on 25 May 1982 from London to Venice.
I gave the inaugural speech standing on platform 8 at Victoria Station in front of Pullman coach Audrey, facing a battery of cameramen from all over the world.
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