The Marseille Ventimiglia railway has quite a storied history.

When it opened in the early 1870s it provided a link, in fact the only railway link between Italy and France, and remained so until the lines across the Alps via Switzerland were constructed later in the nineteenth century.

Part of the PLM – the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranée railway – as well as providing an important freight and communication link, it ferried the late Victorian and Edwardian upper classes to the Riviera to spend the winter there and escape the cold, the damp, and the perpetual coal smoke of England.

As well as Menton on the French side, there was a large English community on the Italian side, both in San Remo itself and in the hills behind the town. Italy was a little cheaper, which meant that those living on army or colonial service pensions could live a little better.

So popular was the Riviera, the Compagnie International des Wagons-Lits began to run a special train, Le Train Bleu, from Calais to Menton – first class only of course – that ran overnight and avoided the need to change trains (and stations) in Paris.

Queen Victoria loved Menton and loved the journey, visiting Menton for a winter holiday several times from 1882 onwards, and her son, Prince Leopold, possibly the most normal of her children, died in Cannes in 1884 from heamophilia, having gone there to winter in a warmer climate.

On her first visit she was accompanied by John Brown, who apparently insisted on wearing a solar topee with his kilt – something that must have amused the locals.

Suspended during world war one, Le Train Bleu resumed in 1920 and continued to run until the start of world war two. The service again resumed in 1949, but with the growth of air travel, it became less popular, and formally ceased to run in 2003, although a barebones overnight service with couchettes and standard carriages continued to run until 2017.

However, post-Covid, a barebones couchette and sit up overnight service has resumed. While lacking in the glamour of the old train, rattling down to the Mediterranean overnight still will carry a little magic…

Le Train Bleu serves as background to Agatha Christie’s early novel The Mystery of the Blue Train, but the story is not really about the Train Bleu, like many of her novels it’s a locked room mystery and really about some rather awful English people in a villa outside of Menton.

But it was not all about taking the upper and upper middle classes of Victorian England for a pleasant holiday.

When the Suez canal opened, the Marseilles Ventimiglia line provided a direct link to both Genoa and Livorno, allowing Italian shipping lines to compete with British shipping lines on the routes to Mumbai (then Bombay) and Galle in Sri Lanka for onward connections to East and South East Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

Going with an Italian shipping line offered a slightly quicker journey, and allowed passengers to avoid the storm tossed Bay of Biscay, especially in winter.

This was not just a journey for the well off – the Edwardian travel writer Beth Ellis, who was not a particularly wealthy woman, took the route from Italy by train on her return from Burma (now Myanmar).

And if you look carefully, ghosts of the old PLM are still visible.

In 2023, when dragging our cases across the tramway on the way to Nice-Ville station I glanced to my right at the old iron railway bridge, and you could still see the old PLM crest on the ironwork.

(I didn’t photograph it at the time – when we visited there were rough sleepers and junkies under the bridge and 0630 was not the time to start photographing, and anyway, we had a train to catch, in fact two trains, the local TER to the border, and then an Italian Intercity train, and we had been warned that the morning TER services often ran late… )