Berowne's 137

(For Three-Word Wednesday and ABC Wednesday: "L" is for Lausanne)

Let’s see now. The above prompt is titled "It must be time for lunch now."
I thought to myself, what are some of the most unusual lunches I’ve had, lunches worth a blog post?
Well, there was one that was really special, a lunch I had on a train way back in the early 1960s. Let me tell you about it.
I was working in France when I got a phone call from my mother-in-law, whose voice was ripe with worry. She lived in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Seems she had some kind of terrible legal problem. The police said they could do nothing; the lawyers she had consulted were incompetent. She felt she was all alone. She desperately needed my help.
I felt like pointing out to her that my knowledge of Swiss law was perilously close to zero, and in addition, this came at a bad time. I was in the middle of an important job: i..e., making a living. However, family is family, so I dropped everything and hopped on the next train to Lausanne.

It’s a beautiful city, of course, so in a way I was pleased to be able to visit it again.

We had been under way for just a half-hour or so when they announced lunch. Great timing; I was starved. I looked forward to something good. Meals on trains in France, as you probably know, can be very special.

The dining car startled me. It was beautiful, but in a sort of old-fashioned “belle époque” style, drippig with dignity. I inquired around and was really amazed to learn that I had, quite inadvertently, hopped on what was quite possibly the most famous train in the world, The Orient Express: Paris to Istanbul; first stop, Lausanne.

This was the train that Agatha – sorry, Dame Agatha – Christie had written about in one of the most famous of her 66 detective novels, “Murder on the Orient Express.” As you may know, she was not just wildly creative, she was one of the best selling writers of all time; her novels have sold roughly four billion, that's with a “b,” copies.

There were not just lacerations and murder in her works; in this train there was also usually romance - (none on my trip, however).

My compartment was in the same period style. Agatha’s room must have been just like this one. She took this train to Istanbul and wrote her famous book about it in her hotel room there.
Well, I got off at the first stop, Lausanne. As things turned out my mother-in-law’s legal problem had been solved before I arrived; it seems there had just been a misunderstanding. But that was okay; I had had an adventure: a very special train-ride.

Here’s a photo of a couple of fellow-passengers. I chatted with the chap on the left; he had had a most interesting life. Someone, I thought, should write about him. :-)
(Also submitted to Sunday Scribblings)