Le Train Bleu - Blue Train

Blue Train

The service resumed on 16 November 1920 between Paris and Menton with pre-war carriages, operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits using the Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée., or PLM. The whole route was served again on 9 December 1922. The new Calais-Méditerrannée Express was composed of exclusively first-class, new steel carriages (S-cars) built by Leeds Forge Company in England and the CIWL-works in Munich and a dining car renowned for its haute cuisine five-course dinners. The "introduction ride" was made by two trains with many invitees and nearly 50 journalists, departing from Calais and Paris bound for Nice. The sleeping cars were painted blue with gold trim. This eventually lead to the nickname Blue Train in 1923. This name was taken over soon in English advertisements: "Summer on the French Riviera by the Blue Train".

The height of the season for "le train bleu" was between November and April, when many travellers escaped the British winter to spend time on the French Riviera. Its terminus was at the Gare Maritime in Calais, where it picked up British passengers from the ferries across the English Channel. It departed at 1:00 in the afternoon and stopped at the Gare du Nord in Paris, then travelled around Paris by the Grande Ceinture line to the Gare de Lyon, where it picked up additional passengers and coaches. It departed Paris early in the evening, and made stops at Dijon, Châlons, and Lyon, before reaching Marseilles early the next morning. It then made further stops at all the major resort towns of the French Riviera, or Côte d'Azur: Saint-Raphaël, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, Cannes, Nice, Monte-Carlo, before reaching its final destination, Menton, near the Italian border. The sleeping cars had only ten sleeping compartments each, with one attendant assigned to each sleeping car. Early passengers included the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII), Charlie Chaplin, designer Coco Chanel, Winston Churchill and writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh and Somerset Maugham.

The Great Depression and the devaluation of the Pound Sterling greatly reduced the number of wealthy British and American travellers going to the Riviera, reducing the two trains to two carriages conveyed with the Golden Arrow between Calais and Paris After a one and half hour stop the two luxury cars were conveyed further south by the Côte d'Azur Pullman Express. In 1936, the new Popular Front Government in France introduced the paid two-week vacation for French workers. Second-class and third-class sleeping cars were added to the Blue Train to carry middle and working class French people on holiday to the South of France. In 1938, the Popular Front government nationalized the private railway companies in France, including PLM. After 1938, "le train bleu" was run by the new French national railway company SNCF as an ordinary night express train.