The train that taught the world to think of the French Riviera as a place of sun and bathing was, for most of its working life, a winter service. The Calais–Méditerranée Express ran hardest between November and April, when its passengers were not chasing a tan but escaping the northern damp, and when a good many of the coast's grand hotels closed for the summer.
That inversion is the key to the train the French eventually called Le Train Bleu. It did not follow the fashions of the Côte d'Azur so much as manufacture them, and it then lived long enough to be overtaken by them. Along the way it acquired a colour, a ballet, a detective novel, a restaurant that has outlasted it, and one of motoring's most stubborn myths.
An express built for the invalid season
The Riviera's first tourists went there to be ill. Tobias Smollett wintered in Nice in 1763 and published an account of its climate that sent the British aristocracy south after relief from consumption and rheumatism; in 1834 Lord Brougham, halted near Cannes by a cholera cordon, liked it enough to build a villa. What turned a convalescent habit into an industry was iron. The railway reached Nice in 1864, a hundred thousand visitors arrived the following year, and by 1874 the foreign residents of Nice numbered some twenty-five thousand.
The Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, founded by the Belgian engineer Georges Nagelmackers, moved on the traffic. Its Calais–Méditerranée Express was conceived in December 1883, months after the Orient Express entered service, and appeared in the winter timetable for 1886–87. Calais was not an accident: the train met the Channel packet from Dover and carried its passengers, without a change, past Paris and Lyon and Marseille to Cannes, Nice, Monte-Carlo and Menton. That logic is set out in our account of how Nagelmackers invented the European sleeping car.
How a train acquired its colour
For three decades the train wore varnished teak. Service resumed after the First World War on 16 November 1920, and the full route was running again on 9 December 1922 — by which time the teak had gone. In its place came all-steel Type S cars, the first forty built in 1921 by the Leeds Forge Company in England, with further vehicles from the Wagons-Lits works in Munich. They were painted dark blue and lettered in gold.
The nickname followed almost at once: the Blue Train in English, Le Train Bleu in French. The cars were generous by the standards of the day — ten compartments apiece, an attendant to each sleeping car, nothing below first class. Steel was itself an argument: the American Pullman palace car had made the case for comfort, steel for surviving a derailment. A caution: South Africa's Blue Train is a different service that took only the colour.
What the passengers were buying
The names are those of the interwar Riviera: the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII; Charlie Chaplin; Coco Chanel; Winston Churchill; and the writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh and Somerset Maugham. What they bought was not speed but the deletion of the worst part of the journey: you dined north of Paris and woke near Marseille with the sea on your left. That is why the genre outlived the aeroplane, as it did for the Orient Express of the same decade.
- 1886–87 — it enters the winter timetable.
- 9 December 1922 — the full route runs again, in blue-and-gold steel.
- 13 March 1930 — Barnato leaves Cannes to race the train to London.
- 1936 — second- and third-class sleeping cars are added.
- 1949 — the train is officially renamed Le Train Bleu.
- September 2003 — the name leaves the timetable.
The Bentley that was not there
The best-known story about the train is a motoring one, and the usual version is wrong. In January 1930 Rover's publicist Dudley Noble sent a Light Six from St Raphaël to Calais against the Blue Train, some 750 miles at an average of 38 mph, and beat it by about twenty minutes. Bentley's chairman, Woolf Barnato, took it personally.
On 13 March 1930 Barnato and the amateur driver Dale Bourn left Cannes at 17:45 in a Speed Six. Through heavy rain from Lyon, fog outside Paris and a burst tyre they reached Boulogne at 10:30 the next morning, crossed the Channel and parked outside the Conservative Club in St James's Street, London, at 15:20 — four minutes before the train had even reached Calais. The French authorities fined Barnato more than he had won on the wager, and Bentley was excluded from that year's Paris Salon.
Here is the myth. The car in the paintings, the low Gurney Nutting Sportsman Coupé universally known as the “Blue Train Bentley”, was not delivered until 21 May 1930, two months after the race. The car that actually beat the train was a soberer H. J. Mulliner saloon.
A ballet, a murder and a restaurant
By the mid-1920s the train was shorthand for a way of living, and the avant-garde helped itself. Diaghilev's Ballets Russes premiered Le Train Bleu at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 20 June 1924: scenario by Cocteau, music by Milhaud, choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, costumes by Chanel — the only production for which she designed the entire wardrobe, in sportswear from her own collection. The front cloth was enlarged from a Picasso gouache of two women running on a beach; the Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds it, gives its dimensions as 10.4 by 11.7 metres. The train never appears on stage. It is merely how everyone reached the beach, which was the point.
Agatha Christie set The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) aboard it. In Paris the name attached itself to a building: the first-floor buffet at the Gare de Lyon, raised for the Exposition Universelle of 1900 to designs by Marius Toudoire and inaugurated in 1901 by President Émile Loubet. Renamed Le Train Bleu in 1963 in tribute to the Mediterranean service, several of its rooms were listed as monuments historiques in 1972. It is still open — the most reliable surviving fragment of the story, if you are spending time in Paris.
Democratised, then overtaken
The train's exclusivity did not survive French politics. In 1936 the Popular Front government introduced two weeks of paid holiday for French workers, and second- and third-class sleeping cars were coupled to the Blue Train to carry them south. The coast had already changed season: Chanel's celebrated tan of 1923 helped make summer, rather than winter, the fashionable time to be there. What finished the train was arithmetic. Motorways, cheap flights and finally the TGV, which cut Paris to Nice from around twenty hours to five, left it with no argument to make. In September 2003 the SNCF folded its principal night trains into one brand and the name left the timetable.
Where the Train Bleu still runs
The carriages did not all go for scrap. When James Sherwood began rebuilding a Wagons-Lits train in the late 1970s, starting with two cars bought at auction in Monte Carlo, several of the vehicles he found had Blue Train service behind them. On the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express today, sleeping cars 3473, 3482 and 3483 were built in England in 1929 and went straight onto Le Train Bleu; 3525 alternated between it and the Rome Express through the 1930s; 3539 transferred in 1930; 3543 and 3544 worked it alongside the Pyrénées–Côte d'Argent Express. Dining car 4141, built in 1929, carries glass by René Lalique in what the company called the Côte d'Azur style, examined in our piece on Lalique, Prou and the Wagons-Lits interior.
The destination has moved — the train runs to Venice rather than Menton, and the Channel leg is the work of the British Pullman — but the vehicles are the ones that carried Riviera society to bed. For how the surviving Wagons-Lits services differ, see our comparison of the Orient Express trains, or the full fleet under our trains.
