By Train in the Ukraine

In the early 1990’s I was a radio reporter based in Kiev, the Ukranian capital. I remember well the first time I traveled from Kiev to the port town of Sebastapol where what was by then the remnants of the former Soviet fleet were based.

At the time there were three ways to do this journey. Two options were by train and one was by rickety old helicopter. These helicopters looked dreadful and although flying doesn’t particularly bother me, one look at the rust on any of these machines was enough to turn the most hardened flyer into a quivering wreck.

The two train options were a fast train and a slow train, the former taking about 15 hours and the latter a little over 24 hours. The bizarre thing about these trains was that in true Soviet-style the rail company priced the slow train higher than the fast train – the logic being that you get a lot more train on the slow journey so it should cost more.

I opted for the slow train and as we pulled out of a snow covered Kiev yet more fluffy white flakes began to fall. Each compartment had half a dozen beds – hanging, three high against each side of the compartment. The room was unbearably hot as the each carriage was fiercely heated by a wood burning stove that was endlessly stoked by the guard that was employed on each and every carriage.

We would stop at unknown and unmarked places in the snow and the cold and the dark and out of nowhere women would appear selling bottles of home-made beer or cheese or loaves of heavy flat bread. I remember sitting in my compartment when the female guard from our carriage came in to share her smoked herring with me. She had it wrapped in a piece of newspaper. I gave some of the beer and cheese I had bought and the train pulled out once again into the dark, snowy night.

A train journey this woman will never forget.