And after a brief interruption, this thread seems to be a good place to post my unexpected research project. In 1936 the noted historian and activist W. E. B. DuBois made a trip around the world. After a visit to Berlin, where years before he had studied,
he went to China and Japan. A condensed schedule for the name trains turned up in his papers in the UofM Amherst library. It was mimeographed by the Intourist office in Berlin with the German spellings of place names of that time.
In what turned out to be a bigger project than I expected I've translated the transliterations and updated place names that have changed. There are notes with older names and a few items missing due to damaged portions of the mimeograph stencil.
In addition to the 2x weekly
Manchuria Express, which may have just been a sleeper tagged onto the
Siberia headed to Vladivostok, the schedule for the
Asia Express is included. It has a lengthy Wikipedia listing. My dad had a brochure about it from the San Francisco Exposition, the first all-air conditioned streamliner in the world, .
This is how an open section sleeper looked back then in the comedy
Tractoristii.
1936 was a good time to get this bucket list trip taken care of, because all hell broke loose in the next year.