The Ukranian drivers that keep the trains running in a war zone
The Ukrainian railway network has been placed under huge strain by the conflict and is relying on its workers pulling mammoth shifts to keep refugees moving
Andriy Bobrovskiy in the cab of the train he drives between Kyiv and Lviv
Andriy Bobrovskiy, a train driver, pulled into Lviv central station on Wednesday at 3am after a nine-hour journey from the capital city Kyiv, a convoy of battered blue wagons in tow.
Inside the carriages, displaced civilians waited anxiously to step into the freezing night and continue their journey, the latest in
Ukraine’s exodus of people.
Eight hours later the 30-year-old driver was back at the station, an imposing art nouveau building that is a point of convergence for many of the people fleeing to neighbouring countries because of the war.
Inside the small cab he shares with his co-driver, Bobrovskiy drinks coffee and tea and listens to Ukrainian pop music to keep awake as he readies himself to drive the more than 300 miles back to Kyiv to collect civilians. His diet is a combination of sandwiches and biscuits, and an image of St Nicholas watches over him as he heads east with aid and back west with civilians.
Passengers are crowded into carriages at twice or even three times the normal capacity. As a precaution, the trains have been slowed from 50mph to 37mph because if something goes wrong, fewer will get hurt.
Bobrovskiy is one of tens of thousands of staff at Ukrzaliznytsia — the state-owned Ukrainian Railways — who have been working around the clock to shuttle men, women, children and even pets away from the eastern front lines, where cities are being besieged and destroyed by Russian troops.
The country’s vast expanse —
Ukraine is as large as the UK and Germany combined — and an unpredictable fuel supply for motorists has made trains the preferred means of transport since the outbreak of war.
More than
two million people are estimated to have been brought to safety along the country’s 14,000 miles of tracks, according to Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, the head of passenger operations. Most were rescued from Kyiv and the country’s second city, Kharkiv. In the eight days after the Russian invasion, 58,000 foreigners were transported.
Only two weeks ago, railway tickets for the five-hour journey from Lviv to Kyiv cost as little as £14 for second class and just over £35 for first class. Since the war started, travelling by train is free, although the official Ukrzaliznytsia website still warns that
Russian and Belarusian credit cards are not accepted for payment. Attempts to extort payments are being investigated as a serious crime.
The number of operational trains has been increased and the schedules are updated every evening, once the railways’ managers have taken stock of damage inflicted by the Russians during the day. A map issued on Friday morning showed a sea of red ink marking station and line closures deep into border areas to the north and east and adjoining the Black Sea to the south.
“Unfortunately, it is still impossible to ensure compliance with the schedule, so trains continue to move with delays due to operational changes of routes, slowing down near stations with bomb shelters and waiting for a safe window for travel,” the railway announced last week.
As well as evacuating refugees, trains have been used to deliver aid to parts of the country under Russian attack
Drivers such as Bobrovskiy have been at the sharp end of these operations, working 14 to 20-hour days to ensure the safe passage of civilians. Before
the outbreak of war, train drivers were not allowed to work more than 12 hours.
“They seem lost and really sad that they have to leave their home,” he said of his passengers.
Only three weeks ago, Bobrovskiy was shuttling families on holiday, business executives on important trips and couples on romantic getaways. Today he is responsible for taking civilians out of the Russian line of fire. This means travelling towards conflict areas daily.
“We hear explosions,” he said, standing outside the locomotive in only a woolly jumper on a bitter morning. “It’s fine for us — it’s a normal thing in Kyiv.”
Other drivers have recently been redeployed from their usual duties, driving commuter trains in the Odesa region, after those services had to be suspended.
A girl looks out from a train evacuating her and her family from Lviv railway station to Poland
Bobrovskiy is very matter-of-fact when he speaks of having to guide the train towards the war zone, the long hours of work and not seeing his family as often as he used to.
On Wednesday morning he waited patiently for additional wagons to reach Lviv from the Polish border. After collecting passengers in Kyiv, the extra wagons were scheduled to travel straight to Poland, without stopping in Lviv, as most trains have done until now.
Across the tracks, another driver took refuge from the cold inside the cab of a green locomotive. Yaroslav has been driving trains for seven years but this is the first time he has been responsible for the safety of this many people at once.
“It’s a tragic situation right now, but we have to evacuate people from fascism,” he said from the small window of the train cab.
His job these days is to travel east to the city of Vinnytsia, where a Russian missile attack last week destroyed the civilian airport. There, he hands over the train to colleagues who push further east.
“We have to work. This is our job. We’re doing this every day,” Yaroslav said. He often must slow down and wait for air raid sirens to die down before he can continue. “It’s a little bit harder but it’s our job to evacuate people.”
Women and children on a packed train as they start their journey to flee Ukraine
His colleague, Ihor, has smiling blue eyes and a love of Winston Churchill and anti-Soviet quotes. “Boris Johnson should help us,” he laughs over the roar of the train engines.
“We’re doing what we must in this military situation,” Ihor, 55, said. “You must be responsible to do this job, because it’s very important — it’s all about people’s lives.”
Ihor is due to retire next year but this might not be an option if the war continues.
He speaks loudly before popping his head back into the cab to prepare the train for departure. Every staff member in Lviv is visibly busy, pieces from a puzzle working together to help fleeing civilians reach safety and to send aid and military equipment and personnel east.
In the morning the train took women and children from Kharkiv, in the northeast of the country, and returned at night — “for its brave residents and defenders, the train carries the necessary products and goods”, Pertsovskyi wrote on his official Facebook page.
Crowds waiting on the platform at Lviv station on a day when only two trains were running
On the return journeys, carriages are stuffed with food, medicine and supplies for children: in the first week of March, the trains delivered 470 tons of such aid to the Kharkiv region and 2,450 tonnes to Kyiv. Images posted by Pertsovskyi on his social media account show wagons overflowing with aid expected to be delivered on Wednesday to Kharkiv.
Pertsovskyi is relentlessly upbeat, boarding trains before dawn to criss-cross the country on morale-boosting staff visits.
One typically defiant posting shows video filmed from the cab as the train barrels through open countryside. It carries the caption: “Location: somewhere in the expanses of our powerful network, which cannot be stopped by savage attacks.”
He is already looking forward to peacetime, when he says the railways will resume their plans to introduce electrification and new intercity services. On Friday he declared: “The company is already developing a plan to transport the population home after the end of hostilities.”
