On October 4, 1883, the first Orient Express left the Gare de l'Est in Paris. The destination on the ticket was Giurgiu, a Danube port in Romania, because the railway did not yet run the whole way: passengers crossed the river by ferry into Bulgaria and took a second train on to Constantinople. It took about 80 hours. Georges Nagelmackers, a Belgian engineer, had put it together.
Nagelmackers had seen Pullman cars in the United States in 1868 and founded the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits in 1872 to run the same idea in Europe, where railways were owned by states that did not cooperate. His solution was to run his own carriages on other people's track, which meant negotiating with each administration in turn, and by 1883 he had sleeping cars running between Ostend, Cologne, Berlin, Vienna and Milan.
The train was luxurious in a particular way. Each sleeping compartment had a folding washbasin, a carpet and curtains that could be drawn, and the carriages were lit by candles and heated by a stove at the end of the corridor, watched by an attendant. There was a restaurant car. There was no corridor between carriages until 1889, so nobody could leave a compartment between stops.
The name became famous. It carried diplomats, spies, couriers and people with reasons to be somewhere else, and it ran through a part of Europe being remade: Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania were all newly independent and the Ottoman empire was contracting. The through service to Constantinople, which is what the name implies, only began in June 1889.
Wagons-Lits ran it, with interruptions for two world wars and for the depression, until 1977, when the direct Paris to Istanbul train was withdrawn. The route is now a series of ordinary night trains, and a privately operated Venice Simplon-Orient-Express has run since 1982 using restored carriages from the 1920s and 1930s. The original cars are why the name still means anything.