Category: Yugoslavia

The last stop in Yugoslavia for the Orient Express, upon which James Bond and Tatiana Romanova were traveling in From Russia With Love is the border town of Sežana.

He slept until Sezana. The hard-faced Yugoslav plain-clothes men came on board.

The trip from Ljubljana to Sežana takes less than an hour. That’s a pretty short nap, for sure.

The station has been in use since 1857, when Sežana was part of Austria. It became a part of Italy after WWI and then following WWII Yugoslavia took control of the town and station.

As indicated further in the text,  Sežana is the last stop in Yugoslavia for the train. Next up, Italy.

After departing Zegreb, the Orient Express carrying James Bond and Tatiana Romanova thundered on.

They hammered into the mountains of Slovenia where the apple trees and the chalets were almost Austrian. The train labored its way through Ljubliana. The girl awoke. They had a breakfast of fried eggs and hard brown bread with coffee that was mostly chicory.

It’s unclear whether they actually stop at the station. They have that breakfast in the restaurant car.

The station was built in 1848 and has served as the principal railway station since.

 

After passing through Vincovci and Brod, the Orient Express carrying James Bond and Tatiana Romanova came to the ugly sprawl of Zegreb.

Zagreb Glavni kolodvor (Or Zagreb main station) is the largest station in Croatia. It has been in service since 1892.

As they pull through the station:

The train came to a stop between lines of rusting locomotives captured from the Germans and still standing forlornly amongst the grass and weeds on the sidings. Bond read the plate on one of them – BERLINER MASCHINENBAU GMBH – as they slid out through the iron cemetery. Its long black barrel had been raked with machine gun bullets.

BERLINER MASCHINENBAU GMBH as you might imagine, was a German manufacturer of locomotives. (The GmbH basically means “company with limited liability.”)

From the information on this picture (again from the Jack Firns LIFE collection) this is apparently one of those captured locomotives sitting at Zagreb station in 1950. (NOTE: See comment below.)You can see the station in the background.

Bond then thinks “nostalgically and unreasonably” about that war compared to the war he is currently fighting.

They then head into the mountains of Slovenia.

After Tempo leaves them at Belgrade, James Bond and Tatiana Romanova are back on the Orient Express. At nine o’clock the train pulls “out on its all-night run down the valley of the Sava.”

Bond examines the passports of the new passengers of the train, and then settles in “for another night with Tatiana’s head on his lap.”

That night, “Vincovci came and Brod and then, against a flaming dawn, the ugly sprawl of Zagreb.”

The stations of Vinkovci (note the “k’) and Brod (Slavonski Brod – which actually translates as “Liverpool”) were pass-throughs on the route of the Orient Express. Any stops during the overnight run would likely have been very brief.

 

Next up, Zagreb.

After James Bond is alerted to a tragedy involving his friend and colleague, Darko Kerim, the next stop for the train is at Belgrade, where they meet up with Stefan Trempo – one of Darko’s sons.

The Belgrade–Glavna Station was built in 1884, and became part of the first Paris-Constantinople (Istanbul) Orient Express route in 1888. It remains the busiest terminal in the country.

We’re not given many details about this station, other than the station square, which they cross to get into Trempo’s car.