Rail-ID · Railing Transnational Identities along the (Simplon)-Orient Express, 1880s-1940

This project investigates how interior design, technological innovation, and comfort infrastructures shaped a material culture of transnational mobility networks, enabling the circulation of cosmopolitan values and collective identities across Europe from the 1880s to 1940. It analyses the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL) most famous line, Simplon-Orient Express, as a transnational framework where carefully designed interiors functioned as markers of luxury, privilege and socio-economic class identity. It hypothesises that the upper-class clientele identified with cosmopolitan values and modernist aspirations over nationalist discourses, informing transnational, collective identities predating later European political integration.The study analyses semi-public interiors as a material continuum linking mobile and fixed spaces across the CIWL network. It focuses on three sets of interiors: (1) CIWL rolling stock, including sleeping, restaurant, and lounge cars; (2) CIWL-managed hotels in urban and resort locations; and (3) emerging hotel infrastructures in the Western Balkans (Zagreb, Belgrade), regions often overlooked in studies of European mobility and modernity. By treating these interiors as architectural objects that mediated social interaction, self-representation and identity, the project shows how technology, aesthetics, and design facilitated the transfer of transnational values along mobility networks.The research combines architectural history, mobility, transportation and tourism studies with material culture, sociology and European studies, embedding archival study, object and spatial analysis and digital humanities. It creates an interdisciplinary methodology to analyse the circulation of identity and values across fixed and mobile spaces in transnational frameworks.