Sleeping-car passengers, however, will know little of their entry into Greece until, at 6 a.m. on the third morning after leaving Paris, the short train runs over the Vardar plain, with dawn glimpses of Mount Athos to the east and of cloud-capped Olympus across the gulf to the south, past the rebuilt yard and into the new passenger station at Salonica.
1951 November, 'Pausanias', “To Greece by the "Simplon-Orient Express"”, in Railway Magazine, page 731