As our train into Tczew, a small city in northern Poland, thousands throng the station platform. Flashbulbs flare, and people cheer, some handing their cameras through the train windows so that we can photograph our compartments for them. By day six of the trip, we are taking the rock-star treatment in stride. All through Slovakia and Poland, locals have shown up trackside to celebrate the Orient-Express's inaugural trip to these countries, so compelling is the aura of this spectacular antique train. Its seventeen meticulously restored cars (including a bar car with a grand piano) are carrying ninety-eight passengers from Venice to Prague, passing through the Austrian Alps and verdant Polish farmland and stopping overnight in Vienna, Kraków and Warsaw. By road, the journey is some 500 miles, but aboard the train it's stretched to nearly 2,000.
This Eastern European itinerary brings us to a history-soaked region of the Continent that is only now coming of age, touristically, two generations after World War II. As we visit scenes of war — Oskar Schindler's factory on the outskirts of Kraków, a bronze memorial to the Warsaw Uprising — we are traveling not just through the past but in it, inhabiting cars that date from the late 1920s and early '30s. One morning, as I pad down to the loo at the end of my sleeper car (en suite toilets did not number among the comforts of early-20th-century rail travel), I reflect that there are more comfortable ways to get from A to Z, but few as distinctive. In the train's heyday, these cars were the ne plus ultra of travel, with acres of glossy wood, intricately inlaid Art Deco walls and Lalique crystal panels. Today we still appreciate such craftsmanship, but we also measure luxury in plumbing and space. My compartment on the train is smaller than the bathroom in my suite will be at Prague's Mandarin Oriental. Showers and air-conditioning? Not a chance.
Still, the passengers have no complaints, since everyone feels that sharing a bathroom and taking a shower only during the hotel stays that alternate with overnights on the train are a fair price to pay for authenticity. The guests, mostly couples from England, France and the U.S., love the rituals of old-style rail life: dressing up in tuxes (black tie is optional) and flashy dresses to dawdle over four courses of French cuisine in the dining car, sharing flutes of Champagne with newfound friends in the bar car, reliving the glamour days of travel. Many passengers are repeat guests who cannot resist a new itinerary. "We do an Orient-Express trip every summer," a couple from England says. A first-timer from Ohio tells me, "I've always wanted to see Poland, where my family is from." It's a companionable conveyance in which people lounge in their compartments with the doors open, happy to chat with anyone who passes by. We all gratefully set our internal clocks to Orient-Express time, whereby nobody feels rushed, and an afternoon's ambition is no greater than to stare out the window for hours.
At eleven in the morning on day two, the train arrives in rain-swept Vienna. I have settled into the rhythm of the journey and disembark to a city alive with the sound of music (fifty concerts are performed every night). The massive six-year-old MuseumsQuartier offers dance, film, architecture, theater—you name it, it's here. I order a midafternoon kaffee mit schlag at Café Diglas (10 Wollzeile), a coffee shop popular with locals that is open in midsummer and is cool and welcoming. Refreshed, I hurry over to the Baroque Karlskirche, completed in 1737. Although restoration work is ongoing (it's scheduled for completion in January 2009), you can still enjoy an extraordinary experience: taking an elevator plus a staircase 236 feet up into the dome for a rare close-up look at the frescoes and trompe l'oeil. In the evening I succumb to the touristy temptation to dine at Figlmüller (5 Wollzeile), a boisterous eatery opposite St. Stephen's Cathedral, where the schnitzel, reputed to be the biggest in the city, is the size of a Frisbee and flops off the sides of the plate. A German neighbor delivers the culinary verdict: "Wunderbar."
After a night in the city's Grand Hotel Wien (rooms from $335; 011-43-1-515-800; grandhotelwien.com) and a welcome shower, we reboard the train, which snakes northeastward through Slovakia, the less glamorous southern half of the former Czechoslovakia, settled by Celts and occupied by conquerors from the Romans to the Mongols to the Russians. We pass farm fields and tunnel through the Tatra Mountains — jagged and tall, containing copper and gold — and stop to explore Banská Bystrica, a medieval mining center that's now a university town with small cafés and shops lining a generous main square. One of the rewards of our meandering route is that we can experience this off-the-tourist-map country.
On the third evening, the Orient-Express enters Poland. It's a nation that's still emerging from an occupied past, having spent decades stuck between a rock and a hard place — the opposing forces of Germany and Russia. A young woman I meet in Kraków tells me, "I am fortunate to remember the old days — when we stood in line for bread, and ten rolls of toilet paper was a fortune — and to live in the new days." Students now flock to the college town of Kraków, where Copernicus studied, as they did to Prague in the 1990s.
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