Map of the route of the Taurus Express
The Taurus Express was a passenger train operating between Istanbul and Baghdad, operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. The service began in 1930, with trains departing Haydarpaşa Station (on the Asian side of Istanbul). However, for most of the 1930s, a gap in the existed where the line ended at Nissibin (and later Tel Kotchek) at the Turkish-Syrian border. Passengers transfered to cars which took them to Kirkuk in Iraq, and from there, by train to Baghdad. Only in 1940 was the line completed and a through train service established between Istanbul and Baghdad.
The Taurus Express in works by Agatha Christie[]
Hercule Poirot boarded the train in Aleppo, Syria, with the intention to travel to Istanbul to catch the Orient Express. Already onboard the train were Mary Debenham and Colonel Arbuthnot. (Murder on the Orient Express) During the time of the novel, the end of the line was at Nissibin on the Turkish side, and Kirkuk on the Iraqi side, and the journey in between was done by car. Hence Arbuthnot told Poirot: "I first met Miss Debenham when she and shared the railway convoy car from Kirkuk to Nissibin." From Aleppo, the passengers travelled on to Haydarpaşa Station on the Asian side of Istanbul and crossed by ferry to the European side, stopping at the Totkatlian Hotel. Here they caught the Orient Express at Sirkeci Station.
In An Autobiography, Christie recounted that after arriving in Istanbul, "Next day, I was called on by Cook's representatives in the most conventional fashion, and taken across the Bosphorus to Haidar Pasha (Haydarpaşa), where I resumed my journey on the Orient Express (she meant the Taurus express)." Christie took a different branch of the Taurus Express. From Istanbul she travelled to Aleppo and took a branch of the Taurus Express to Damascus. After touring Damascus for a few days, she travelled to Baghdad by the bus service ran by the Nairn brothers. An experience that inspired The Gate of Baghdad. According to Christie, the experience on the Taurus Express was different from that on the Orient Express. "There was a subtle difference on passing from Europe into Asia. It was as though time had less meaning. The train ambled on its way, running by the side of the Sea of Marmara, and climbing mountains--it was incredibly beautiful all along this way." She also found that as the journey proceeded, "The meals became more unpalatable and fuller of hot, greasy, tasteless morsels as we went further East."
The journey included a halt where passengers could get off to look at the Cilician Gates (the famous mountain pass through the Taurus mountains from the Anatolian plateau to the Cilician plains). "It was a moment of incredible beauty. I have never forgotten it. I was to pass that way many times again, both going to and coming from the Near East and, as the train schedules changed, I stopped there at different times of day and night: sometimes in the early morning, which was indeed beautiful; sometimes, like this first time, in the evening at six Oclock; sometimes, regrettably, in the middle of the night. This first time I was lucky, I got out with the others and stood there. The sun was slowly setting, and the beauty indescribable. I was so glad then that I had come--so full of thankfulness and joy. I got back into the train, whistles blew, and we started down the long side of a a mountain gorge.... So we came slowly down through Turkey and into Syria at Aleppo."[1]
The Taurus Express in works by Mary Westmacott[]
When Joan Scudamore travels from Baghdad to London, she boards the Taurus Express in Tell Abu Hamid. (Absent in the Spring) In the mid 1930s, the line had been extended from Nissibin to Tel Kotchek on the Syrian-Iraqi border but there was still no complete link to Baghdad. Joan Scudamore traveled by car from Mosul to Tel Abu Hamid and was stranded there. Tel Abu Hamid is the start of the Taurus express line and is presumbably the name Christie used for Tel Kotchek.
References[]
- ↑ Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 2010), 479-485, ebook edition.