The carriages of the Eastern & Oriental Express were not built for Asia at all. They were ordered from Hitachi and Nippon Sharyo in 1969 for an overnight express between Auckland and Wellington, ran in New Zealand as the stainless-steel Silver Star from 1971 to 1979, and were then sold, regauged and shipped north to become the most famous train on the Malay Peninsula.
That second-hand pedigree is fitting, because the railway they run on was itself assembled from pieces: a sultan's private line, a string of short tin railways built by British Residents, a treaty with Siam and a causeway across the Johor Strait. Understanding how those fragments became one main line explains why the E&O exists, and why its route looks the way it does.
A sultan beat the British to it
The usual story says the railway age in Malaya began on 1 June 1885, when the line from Taiping to Port Weld opened to traffic. That is the first British-built commercial railway, but it is not the first railway. In 1869 Abu Bakar, then Maharaja of Johor, began a line from Johor Bahru towards Gunong Pulai, where he hoped to build a hill resort and sanatorium. Its engineer was James Meldrum, its locomotive came from India and was named Lady Clarke after the wife of the Governor of the Straits Settlements, and by September 1875 a Singapore newspaper was already reporting its abandonment. The Johore Wooden Railway was, in effect, a royal amusement.
Abu Bakar tried again with the Muar State Railway, linking Muar with the coast at Parit Jawa, which opened in 1890 and proved profitable on passengers and goods. Pupils at the English school in Muar travelled free. A new road eventually starved it of traffic and it closed in 1929.
Tin, not travellers
The lines that did survive were built for one cargo. After the Pangkor Treaty of 1874 placed British Residents in the Malay states, Hugh Low in Perak secured funds for a railway from the Larut tin fields at Taiping to the river port of Port Weld, today Kuala Sepetang. Construction began in 1882 with help from Pioneer companies of the British Army in Ceylon. The line ran roughly eight miles; sources give figures between about 12 and 13.5 kilometres. Its first engine, Lady Weld, later became FMSR No. 1.
Selangor followed on 10 September 1886 with a 19-mile line from Kuala Lumpur to Bukit Kuda, pushed by the Resident, Frank Swettenham, and extended to Klang in 1890. Negeri Sembilan's line from Seremban to Port Dickson was built by a private concession between 1888 and 1891. Each ran from mines to the sea and none connected to any other. The economics justified the haste: by the 1890s, according to the volunteer historians of Malaysia's National Museum, British Malaya was producing more tin than the rest of the world combined.
Stitching the peninsula together
Federation in 1896 gave Swettenham the authority to join the fragments. The Federated Malay States Railways was formed in 1901, and by 1903 trains ran from Prai, opposite Penang, south to Port Dickson. The Johor sultanate initially refused a line through its territory; a Railway Convention signed in London in 1904 broke the impasse, and the Johore State Railway opened to the public in 1909. The northern gap closed after the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909 transferred Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Terengganu to British influence.
- 1 June 1885 Taiping to Port Weld opens
- 10 September 1886 Kuala Lumpur to Bukit Kuda opens
- 1901 Federated Malay States Railways formed
- 1 December 1905 Tampin to Malacca opens; Malacca to Penang becomes an overnight trip rather than a voyage of two or three days
- 1 July 1909 Johore State Railway opens to the public
- 1 July 1918 link at Padang Besar joins the Siamese system; international trains to Bangkok begin
- 17 September 1923 Johor Causeway opens to goods trains, with passengers from 1 October
- 5 September 1931 East Coast line completed through Pahang to Kelantan
By 1935, fifty years after Taiping, the network had laid 1,321 miles of track and built 213 permanent stations. The gauge throughout was one metre, a detail that matters later in this story.
The station that was supposedly built for snow
The architectural expression of all this ambition stands in Kuala Lumpur. The old railway station, designed by Arthur Benison Hubback in a Mughal-influenced style of domes and chhatri, was completed in 1910, with the surrounding complex finished later. It is the subject of the peninsula's most repeated railway legend: that its roof was engineered to carry snow, because the British specification for station roofs demanded it.
The story may contain a grain of truth about imported standards, but it should be treated with caution. Popular accounts cannot agree whether the load was two metres of snow or three, and none we found cites a drawing or specification. What contemporary descriptions do record is more practical: a steel roof left partly open so that locomotive smoke could escape, later closed in with corrugated sheeting.
Silver Star to Eastern & Oriental
The Silver Star was New Zealand Railways' answer to the jet. Planned from 1963 and ordered in 1969, it offered en-suite twin rooms, single bedrooms and a full crew of stewards on a run of around twelve and a half hours. An aircraft did the same journey in just over one. Fuel prices after 1973 and labour costs did the rest, and the train was withdrawn in June 1979. Attempts to reuse the stainless-steel cars were complicated by asbestos in their construction.
Orient-Express, the company built by James Sherwood around the restored Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, bought the carriages around 1990. Accounts differ on how many: figures of 31 cars purchased and 24 converted both appear. Because New Zealand runs on a 1,067 mm gauge and the Malayan network on 1,000 mm, the bogies were regauged before the cars went anywhere. Belmond's own history simply says the carriages were purchased in Japan, which is true of where they were built but omits their eight years in New Zealand.
The interiors were rebuilt to evoke the colonial-era sleeping car, borrowing deliberately from the European template that Georges Nagelmackers established; the story of that template is told in our piece on Nagelmackers and the European sleeping car. The train entered service in 1993 between Singapore and Bangkok, using the 1918 Padang Besar connection and the 1923 causeway, with Kuala Lumpur and the Penang crossing at Butterworth as natural pauses. It ran from Tanjong Pagar, the Art Deco Singapore terminus opened in 1932, until that station closed on 30 June 2011 and services moved to Woodlands.
The same rails today
After a pause during the pandemic, the Eastern & Oriental Express returned in 2024 under Belmond with circular journeys from Singapore into Malaysia rather than through to Bangkok. Its passengers now cross Abu Bakar's Johor, pass the tin country around Taiping and Ipoh, and reach the ferry coast for Penang, effectively tracing the order in which the peninsula was joined up. The cars that were too slow for Auckland businessmen turned out to be exactly the right speed for travellers who want to see the country.
For readers comparing it with its European relations, our guide to the Orient Express trains compared sets the E&O beside its sister services, and the world's greatest luxury train journeys places it among long-distance rail routes elsewhere. The full range of trains is listed under our trains, and earlier heritage features are collected in the Journal.
