The Orient Express train makes its inaugural run leaving Paris with 40 passengers for Constantinople, (as the city of Istanbul was still commonly called in the west) and ending in Giurgiu, Romania, with stops in Munich and Vienna.
At Giurgiu, passengers were ferried across the Danube to Ruse, Bulgaria, to pick up another train to Varna where they were then ferried by steamship across the Black Sea to Constantinople. With this one trip, the notion of long-distance travel was completely redefined. All original Orient Express routes finally retired in 2009 after almost 100 years of the most famous train journeys in the world. More
