The new curtailed service left Strasbourg at 22:20 daily, shortly after the arrival of a TGV from Paris, and was attached at Karlsruhe to the overnight sleeper service from Amsterdam to Vienna. After this, the route, still called the 'Orient Express', was shortened to start from Strasbourg instead, occasioned by the inauguration of the LGV Est which afforded much shorter travel times from Paris to Strasbourg. Its immediate successor, a through overnight service from Paris to Bucharest, was later cut back in 1991 to Budapest, and in 2001 was again shortened to Vienna, before departing for the last time from Paris on Friday 8 June 2007. In 1977, the Orient Express stopped serving Istanbul. The Orient Express was a showcase of luxury and comfort at a time when travelling was still rough and dangerous. The two city names most prominently associated with the Orient Express are Paris and Istanbul, the original endpoints of the timetabled service. Although the original Orient Express was simply a normal international railway service, the name became synonymous with intrigue and luxury rail travel. Several routes in the past concurrently used the Orient Express name, or slight variations.
The route and rolling stock of the Orient Express changed many times. The Orient Express was a long-distance passenger train service created in 1883 by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL) that operated until 2009. Poster advertising the winter 1888–1889 timetable
