Georges Nagelmackers

person · earth · Liège

Belgian engineer and businessman, born in Liège on 25 June 1845 and died at Villepreux, France, on 10 August 1905. He travelled in the United States in 1867–68, was impressed by Pullman's night trains, and on returning founded the sleeping-car business on 1 October 1872 that became the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. What he actually invented was not a carriage but a contractual position: an international operator standing between national railways and the passenger. The Orient Express of 1883 is that idea taken to its limit — a train assembled across five or six administrations, none of which could have run it alone.