Wagons Lits stock in Eastern Europe 1935, but where exactly?

[Czesziafan]

When was that? The China Eastern Railway ceased to exist as a distinct railway when it was regauged and incorporated into the Manchukuo National Railway network in 1935.

Behrend gives a date of approximately 1931-1933 for these accounts.

I think it's the Polish frontier station at Stołpce. Most of the pictures at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Stolbtsy_railway_station show a smaller building, but in this one you can just see both buildings. With the help of Google Translate, I conclude that the larger building was a customs and post office, as opposed to the station itself.

Wikipedia also has some old pictures of Niegoroloye: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_images_of_Nieharełaje.

I'm not sure why luggage would have been carried from the CIWL train towards the customs building at Stołpce, given that eastbound travellers changed at Niegoroloye, but I'm sure it must be that building, unless there was one somewhere else that looked identical from that angle.

I've found a blog post (in Polish, but Google Translate does a reasonable job) about that border crossing; there are larger versions of some of the same pictures here. Interestingly, given the discussion of Manchuria above, it appears that there were through carriages from the Polish-Soviet border to the Soviet-Manchurian border (I wonder if they went further into Manchuria before 1935).

Unless the photo actually shows the Westbound service: according to Behrend "the empty sleepers of the capitalists returned rapidly to Stoplce, the Polish frontier station, there to await their passengers from Russia." So it would be logical for them to have to clear Polish customs and immigration there before boarding the WL train.

 

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It certainly seems likely that it's the westbound service -- according to the blog post that I linked to, the eastbound Nord Express reached the border in the middle of the night, and that's how it's described in the book Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy MacLean, who made the journey in 1937. I presume that in both directions passengers weren't required to leave the train for the exit formalities of the country they were leaving. It's just that in the picture it looks as if some cases are being carried from the train to the building, whereas you'd expect them to go Soviet train > customs building > CIWL train. Maybe it was something as simple as a mix-up over which carriage those cases were to go in.