Gare de l'Est, Paris

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The Paris terminus the Express d'Orient left on 4 October 1883 with around two dozen passengers. It matters which station: the Gare de l'Est serves the eastward main lines through Strasbourg into the German network, and the 1883 route ran Paris–Strasbourg–Munich–Vienna–Budapest–Bucharest–Giurgiu. When that corridor became politically unusable after 1918 the successor service moved across Paris to the Gare de Lyon and took the Swiss and Italian route instead. A station choice encodes a geopolitical alignment.