Le Train Bleu (lit. "the blue train"), officially the Calais-Mediterranée Express, was a luxury French night express train which operated from 1922 to 2007. It gained international fame as the preferred train of wealthy and famous passengers between Calais and the French Riviera in the two decades before World War II. It was colloquially referred to as "le train bleu" in French and the Blue Train in English because of its dark blue sleeping cars, and became formally known as Le Train Bleu after World War II.
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The Blue Train was created by a private French railroad company, the Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée, or PLM, to take rich British travellers south to the French Riviera. It made its first journey on 8 December 1922.
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. Its terminus was at the Gare Maritime in Calais, where it picked up British passengers from the ferries across the English Channel. It departed at 1:00 in the afternoon and stopped at the Gare du Nord in Paris, then travelled around Paris by the Grande Ceinture line to the Gare de Lyon, where it picked up additional passengers and coaches. It departed Paris early in the evening, and made stops at Dijon, Châlons, and Lyon, before reaching Marseilles early the next morning. 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.
The Blue Train was exclusively first-class, composed of steel sleeping cars operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits and a dining car renowned for its haute cuisine five-course dinners. The sleeping cars were painted blue with gold trim, and each had only ten sleeping compartments, with one attendant assigned to each sleeping car. 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.
The Great Depression and the devaluation of the Pound Sterling greatly reduced the number of wealthy British and American travellers going to the Riviera. In 1936, the new Popular Front Government in France introduced the paid two-week vacation for French workers. 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. In 1938, the Popular Front government nationalized the private railway companies in France, including PLM. After 1938, "le train bleu" was run by the new French national railway company SNCF as an ordinary night express train.
Service was interrupted during the Second World War but resumed again after the war, when the train officially took the name Le Train Bleu. Scheduled airline service began between Paris and Nice in 1945, which took away much of the wealthy clientele. After 1978, the train added cars with couchettes to attract more middle-class passengers.
Beginning in the 1980s the night express trains were gradually replaced by the high-speed TGV trains, which cut the length of the journey from Paris to Nice from twenty hours to five, and this effectively ended the era of luxury night trains to the French Riviera. The train itself lasted until 9 December 2007, by which time it had lost its dining car and most of its sleeping cars.
In 1924, "le train bleu" inspired a ballet of the same name, created by Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, with a story by Jean Cocteau, costumes by Coco Chanel and a curtain painted by Pablo Picasso.
The train was featured in the novel The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) by Agatha Christie, and the novel Mon Ami Maigret (1949) by Georges Simenon.
The Blue Train Races were a series of record-breaking attempts between automobiles and trains in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It saw a number of motorists and their own or sponsored automobiles race against "le train bleu". The Blue Train Bentleys, two Bentley Speed Six automobiles owned by "Bentley Boy" Woolf Barnato, were involved in the Blue Train Races.
In 1963, the belle-epoque restaurant at the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris was renamed Le Train Bleu to honor the historic train.
A French television series, Le train bleu s'arrete 13 fois (lit. "The Blue Train Stops 13 times"), appeared on the French channel ORTF between October 8, 1965 and March 11, 1966. 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.
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).