[chelseadrg]

Sorry if the subject maybe was a little vague but I did not know how to word it for now..

I was wondering if there were ever any express trains roughly between 1920 and the 2000s (excluding wars and the berlin wall era) that had the same passenger carriages traveling between both countries thanks to truck exchanges enroute?

My story is a little funny - I had bought a like-new Sachsenmodelle wagon for cheap but it did not take me long to realize something looked a little weird about it, and eventually I realized I had bought not a German wagon but a Soviet one! However the body shell is built to the four feet gauge rather than five so it still looks okay behind the other DR carriages I have. So I may as well as keep the wagon around for infrequent uses once in a while just to have fun confusing people watching my layout but I was wondering if there was a prototype for this in real life nevertheless!

[hmmueller]

See e.g. here in the Wikipedia. One of the images shows a Russian car at Berlin. I also remember Russian cars at Vienna(Austria)'s South Station in the early 1980s ... Trucks were (and are, AFAIK) changed at Brest.

I believe there were many more such trains.

Edit: You can try to search for trains at "Datenbank Fernverkehr"; one example of a train connecting Moscow to Berlin on to Paris is e.g. D 240/241.

H.M.

[mike c]

As far as I remember, there were trains that contained segments which travelled to Moscow from Western Europe, including the best known ones from Brussels, Paris and the single sleeping car from Bern. The coaches were usually attached to trains running from those European capitals to West Berlin and then on to the Ostbahnhof, where they would be attached to trains running to Warsaw and on to Moscow.

In all cases, the coaches were Soviet RZD coaches. There were no Western coaches that were used outside of the normal gauge network.

See: https://modellbahn-schweiz.net/zug-des-m...m-kaeserberg-2/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/johannes-j...57692276191500/
http://www.reisezugwagen.eu/?p=27284

Regards

Mike C

[chelseadrg]

Thanks H.M especially for that database link which was interesting.

And thanks Mike, actually also that A.C.M.E wagon actually looks identical to what I have here too.

[Alex R]

Hi there,

Sorry for my late reply, but just to complement H.M.’s and Mike’s comments:

Until today that service continues (maybe not to the same extent), but the Talgo-based Strizh (Стриж train, for instance, connects Moscow and Berlin several times a week (maybe suspended for some time due to corona).

If my recollection is correct (I took one of those trains back in 1993) in the past the main consist between Moscow and Berlin was made up of the typical soviet coaches that were also used for Soviet / Russian domestic services (apparently all the lines down to Berlin (at least Lichtenberg) are fit for Russian coaches with the wider profile). The through coaches, however, respected the UIC profile. They look quite small, almost tiny, compared to the Soviet coaches. It may well be that the Sachsenmodelle coach you bought is one of these (at least these are the only Sachsenmodelle Russian coaches I know – but I am in no way a specialist in Sachsenmodelle).

Another interesting observation: The through coaches to Switzerland were locked in Germany. The reason was that the passengers in those coaches would not necessarily have a valid visa for Germany. That meant that people traveling from Russia to, say, Frankfurt could not use these coaches although they were attached from Berlin to Switzerland to a train running through Frankfurt. I myself was very surprised to see that the normal (i.e. non-sleeper) train from Berlin to the south of Germany that I switched to carried the same coaches that had come on “my” train all the way from Moscow to Berlin…

One final remark: The switching of the trucks in Brest-Litovsk was quite boring because passengers had to stay on the train all the time. However, there were also trains taking a route further to the south (e.g. Prague – Kiev (- Moscow?)) that went via Chop on the Slovakian-Ukrainian border, and there I was able to get off the train and watch the process. Pity I did not have a camera on me (although I may have chosen to not use it anyway – it felt still like a certain risk to photograph railroad installations at that time).

Hope that helps.

Kind regards,
Alex

[lernkern]

Moin.

Alex' reply reminded me of something, but I am going off topic there.

[quote="Alex R" post_id=2152732 time=1597603036 user_id=41549]
Another interesting observation: The through coaches to Switzerland were locked in Germany. The reason was that the passengers in those coaches would not necessarily have a valid visa for Germany.
[/quote]

Back in the pre-Schengen Agreement days, I travelled from Innsbruck (Austria) to Salzburg (Austria) via Rosenheim (Germany). The train was called a "corridor train" on the German section and would be locked as well. I think there were quite some of those trains around back in the day.

Best

Joerg