Phantoms & Meteors

Trains play a significant part in a number of Fleming's books and the novels Live & Let Die and Goldfinger both feature railroad trips between New York and Florida.

The Seaboard Air Line Railroad introduced the Silver Meteor, a diesel powered service between New York and Florida, in 1939.  The train used to split at Wildwood with the front half of the train heading southwest towards the Gulf Coast and the rear to Miami.

In Live and Let Die, Bond and Solitaire take The Silver Phantom from Pennsylvania station through Newark, Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.  The Silver Phantom was a fictional name conjured up by Fleming, the trains operated by the Seaboard Air Line Railroad at the time were named the Silver Meteor and Silver Star.

Fortuitously they slip off the train at Jacksonville and take the Silver Meteor (this time a real train name), to Tampa and avoid an attack on the Phantom.

"'There's a long stretch of straight track between Waldo and Ocala,' continued Leiter, 'running through forest and swamp land. State highway right alongside the track. About twenty minutes outside Waldo, Wham! goes a dynamite emergency signal under the leading Diesel. Driver comes down to forty. Wham! And another Wham! Three in line! Emergency! Halt at once!" 

Three of Mr Big's agents walk down the outside of the stopped train:

"Twenty yards and they stop outside Car 245. Men with the rippers give a double squirt at your window. Open it up for the pineapple. Centre man tosses in the pineapple and all three run back to the car. Two seconds fuse. As they reach the car, BOOM! Fricassee of Compartment H. Fricassee, presumably, of Mr. and Mrs. Bryce."

A timetable from the early 1950s says it is 42 minutes from Waldo to Ocala on the Silver Meteor.  As the attack happened around 20 minutes after leaving Waldo we can place it just south of the town of Hawthorne where there is a long straight stretch of the line next to the Sid Martin Highway.

Bond & Solitaire leave the train at Clearwater station which is the last station before St Petersburg before heading to the (presumably fictional) Everglades.  On the way they get spotted by Poxy, an associate of the Robber, at the junction of Park Street and Central Avenue.

In Goldfinger, Bond also takes the Silver Meteor from Miami to New York accompanied by his "hostage" Jill Masterton. 

No travel details are given of the journey, presumably as Bond had other things to occupy his mind:

"It had been a wonderful trip up in the train. They had eaten the sandwiches and drunk the champagne and then, to the rhythm of the giant diesels pounding out the miles, they had made long, slow love in the narrow berth."

See my Google map to track 007's train journeys on the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, plus over 850 other locations from Ian Fleming's Bond novels.

A trip to Harlem and where was Mr Big's HQ?

Fleming's second book, Live And Let Die, contains far more real life locations than in Casino Royale and it is evident that the author did a considerable amount of research to provide the intricate detail that would become one of the hallmarks of his work.


Bus Ride

Leiter and Bond venture uptown from the St Regis hotel to explore Harlem or "Mr Big's back-yard". They take the bus, probably the most un-Bond like transport in all the novels, which would most likely be route no. 2 of the Fifth Avenue Coach Company (route would have been Fifth Avenue, West 110th Street (Cathedral Parkway), 7th Avenue)

Bar Crawl

After a scotch-and-soda at Sugar Ray's, Bond and Leiter eat "Little Neck Clams and Fried Chicken Maryland with bacon and sweet corn" at Ma Frazier's.  This long closed restaurant was owned by Lula (Ma) Frazier and also known as Ma Frazier's Dining Room and Frazier's Restaurant.  Accounts vary as to the exact location although most accounts place it at 124th and 7th.  This is however, slightly contradicted by Fleming who implies it is further up the street from Sugar Ray's.  Other sources put it on the same block as Sugar Ray's, or opposite Sugar Ray's and also down the street from the Hotel Theresa (between 124th & 125th Streets),

After a another scotch at the Savoy Ballroom, Bond and Leiter skip Smalls Paradise and visit Yeah Man on West 136th Street before moving on to the fictional Boneyard on Lenox Avenue (since 1987 also known as Malcolm X Boulevard).

For more background to Bond's visit to Harlem, this is an excellent bit of research on Bruce Allen's site, Fleming's Bond.


So where is Mr Big's HQ?  

From Bond's escape, the HQ must be located between 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue "He came to some red traffic lights and jumped them (Lenox Avenue). Several more dark blocks (5th Avenue, Madison Avenue) and then there was a lighted avenue (Park Avenue). There was traffic and he paused until the lights went green. He turned left (actually right) and was rewarded by a succession of green lights, each one sweeping him on and further away from the enemy."

As Bond turns right into Park Avenue, he can be no further North than 132nd Street (any higher than or no further South than 124th Street as Marcus Garvey Park is in the way.

Unfortunately the book gives no more clues as to the location of Mr Big's HQ but maybe there is something in Bruce Allen's suggestion that the Boneyard could well have been based on the real life Lenox Lounge at 288 Lenox Avenue.  If correct, this would place Mr Big's warehouse (which is about a block away) on either 124th Street or 125th Street (Dr Martin Luther King Boulevard).

I have placed Mr Big's Headquarters on 125th Street.  See my Google map to track Bond's routes to and from Harlem, plus over 850 other locations from Ian Fleming's Bond novels.

A few real life places from Casino Royale

Generally considered one of Fleming's best Bond novels, Casino Royale is interestingly one of the least lacking in location detail.  As we have already discussed, Royale-les-Eaux is a fictional town and on the whole, Fleming appears to have written the book based on his own experiences without any of the detailed research that he would do for his later work.


I have tried searching for other locations that appear to be in the area around Royale such as the Dubernes, Les Noctambules and L'Auberge du Fuit Defendu without success.  Similarly, 450 Charing Cross Place in London does not exist and Chaffery's is a fictional Jamaican company. 

However, in an attempt to give his novel some additional authenticity, Fleming does mention a few real life places:


RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, New York City, United States

"Well, in the last few years I've killed two villains. The first was in New York - a Japanese cipher expert cracking our codes on the thirty-sixth floor of the RCA building in the Rockefeller centre, where the Japs had their consulate. I took a room on the fortieth floor of the next-door skyscraper and I could look across the street into his room and see him working. Then I got a colleague from our organization in New York and a couple of Remington thirty-thirty's with telescopic sights and silencers. We smuggled them up to my room and sat for days waiting for our chance. He shot at the man a second before me. His job was only to blast a hole through the windows so that I could shoot the Jap through it. They have tough windows at the Rockefeller centre to keep the noise out. It worked very well. As I expected, his bullet got deflected by the glass and went God knows where. But I shot immediately after him, through the hole he had made. I got the Jap in the mouth as he turned to gape at the broken window." Casino Royale, chapter 20

Dachau Displaced Persons Camp, Munich, Germany

Concentration Camp located near Munich in Germany where Le Chiffre was encountered as a displaced person in June 1945. 



Casino, Monte Carlo, Monaco

World famous casino in Monaco.  Mentioned as the place where Bond "sat in the Casino in Monte Carlo for two months before the war watching that Roumanian team work their stuff with the invisible ink and the dark glasses. He and the Deuxiéme bowled them out in the end and 007 turned in a million francs he had won at shemmy". 


Used as a location in the films Never Say Never Again and Goldeneye.



Château de Fontainebleau, near Paris, France

Château located near Paris and from 1945-1966, the headquarters of NATO's Allied Forces Central Europe. Felix Leiter is based here.



Daily Gleaner, Kingston, Jamaica 

Jamaica's newspaper of record, at the time based at 148–156 Harbour Street, Kingston.  Fawcett, the Picture Editor, is a representative of the Secret Service.



As ever, check out the Google map for these and over 850 other locations featured in the Bond novels.