Le Train Bleu

It gained international fame as the preferred train of wealthy and famous passengers between Calais and the French Riviera during the interwar period.

In December 1883 the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL) created its second luxury train after the Orient Express was introduced in June of that year.

The new Calais-Méditerranée Express was composed of exclusively first-class, new steel carriages (S-cars) built by Leeds Forge Company in England and the CIWL-works in Munich, along with a dining car renowned for its haute cuisine five-course dinners.

[6] The height of the season for le train bleu was between November and April, when many travellers escaped the British winter to spend time on the French Riviera.

It then made further stops at all the major resort towns of the French Riviera, or Côte d'Azur: Saint-Raphaël, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, Cannes, Nice, Monte-Carlo, before reaching its final destination, Menton, near the Italian border.

Early passengers included the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII), Charlie Chaplin, designer Coco Chanel, Winston Churchill and writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh and Somerset Maugham.

Second-class and third-class sleeping cars were added to the Blue Train to carry middle and working class French people on holiday to the South of France.

An overnight train between Paris and Nice continued to run under SNCF's Intercités de Nuit brand, only carrying couchette and reclining seat accommodation and not luxury sleeping cars, but this was discontinued from 9 December 2017 due to withdrawal of funding from the French Government.

In 1924, le train bleu inspired a ballet of the same name, created by Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, with music by Darius Milhaud, a story by Jean Cocteau, choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, stage design by Henri Laurens, costumes by Coco Chanel and a curtain painted by a 1922 work of Pablo Picasso.

Philip Marlowe comes around after being knocked unconscious to see a poster advertising "See the French Riviera by The Blue Train" in Raymond Chandler's novel "The Lady in the Lake" (1943).

It featured one mystery episode for each of the thirteen stops of the Train Bleu between Paris and Menton, based on short stories by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.

[11] The Blue Train is mentioned in the 2022 movie "Downton Abbey: A New Era" (set in 1928) carrying the Grantham family through France to the French Riviera and back.