Venice-Simplon Orient Express

Venice-Simplon Orient Express

The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, or VSOE, is a private luxury train service from London to Venice that is popularly referred to as the Orient Express.

The original company was founded by James Sherwood of Kentucky, USA, in 1982; five years earlier, in 1977, he had bought two of the original carriages at an auction when the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits withdrew from the Orient Express service, passing the service on to the national railways of France, Germany, and Austria. Over the next few years, Sherwood spent a total of $16 million purchasing 35 sleeper, restaurant and Pullman carriages. On 25 May 1982, the first London-Venice run was made.

It is currently owned by Orient-Express Hotels Ltd. The company owns 50 luxury hotels, restaurants, tourist trains and river cruises in 24 countries.

Read more about Venice-Simplon Orient Express:  Orient Express Today, Other VSOE Services, Orient Express in Britain, The British Pullman, Media Coverage

Famous quotes containing the words orient and/or express:

    Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
    When June is past, the fading rose;
    For in your beauty’s orient deep
    These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.

    Ask me no more whither do stray
    The golden atoms of the day;
    For in pure love heaven did prepare
    Those powders to enrich your hair.
    Thomas Carew (1589–1639)

    To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
    Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962)