Border Train Station K.

If you're going urban exploring in Germany, sooner or later you are bound to find objects that are remnants either of the cold war or the German separation in one way or the other.
When the Berlin Wall finally fell in 1989, I was just 14 years old, so I hand't really had the chance to know anything about the time of the cold war.
So when I took up the hobby of urban exploring, I became much more arware of this period in German history, and it never seizes to amaze me how many relicts of that time are still all around us, slowly decaying into oblivion...

This place is an abandoned control station for freight trains going from East Germany to West Germany.
It lies about 15 kilometers from the nearest inner-German border checkpoint, at which only the passenger trains were checked during the time of the German separation.
To also check the freight trains there seemed too much of a security risc for the authorities at the time, so they searched for an existing alternative train station and expanded this small station that had originally been built in 1906.

Well outside the village, new office buildings emerged, new terminal buildings, facilites for the border veterinarian, labs for the Deutrans (an East-German-Russian trucking company, working areas for the railway and of course customs offices.
Every freight train had to stop here and was searched more than thoroughly for "fugitives of the republic".

From what is known, the controls were conducted according to specific pattern.
After the train rolled into the station, the locomotive was uncoupled. Then came the so-called "Customs Demonstrators", railroaders that removed the seals from the freight cars.
The customs official then sent in the dog into the cart to search for blind passengers.
Coal wagons were searched by climbing on top of the load and thrusting long metal rods into the load, beacuse it was aaumed that fugitives might be hiding under the coal.

According to some accounts, there were trip wires next to the tracks to prevent people from jumping the driving trains, and a bridge across the tracks which enabled soldiers to check the trains from above.
At night, the trains could be floodlighted with high performance lights.

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