James Sherwood

person

American-born shipping executive, founder of Sea Containers, who from 1977 bought withdrawn Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits carriages across Europe and restored them, spending a reported US$16 million on some thirty-five sleeping, restaurant and Pullman cars. The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express he assembled from them made its inaugural London–Venice run on 25 May 1982. He died in 2020. His significance for this Journey is precise and slightly deflating: he demonstrated that the romance of these trains is a reproducible product, and that what could not be reproduced — the alignment — had never gone away.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.