Maria Shpionova’s day starts at 4am in the cold and dark of a Ukrainian winter’s night, but at least she doesn’t have to travel far to work.
She is a member of the team that runs Ukraine’s “Food Train”, living onboard in a sleeping car that is connected to converted carriages that house kitchens, fridges and freezers, tanks that can hold 27,000 litres of water and two massive generators.
Two teams of about 12 cooks and seven rail workers take turns to do a two-week shift on the train, providing thousands of meals a day to people living in areas of eastern Ukraine that have been badly hit by nearly three years of all-out war with Russia’s invasion force.
“At the moment the schedule’s not too heavy,” Shpionova says in the sweltering kitchen car, as beyond the window cold rain drenches platform 15 of Kharkiv station.
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“We start at four in the morning and usually finish at about 2pm, and we make meals for around 4,000 people each day. At the peak earlier this year we were making more than 12,000 meals a day, starting at midnight and finishing at 7pm, on our feet the whole time. But the team was the same size – we just got up earlier and worked harder.”
From its current base in Kharkiv, train staff prepare food boxes – cutlets, buckwheat, cabbage salad, muffins and bananas were being packaged up early one morning last week – which are collected by volunteers and distributed around the city and region to places where housing and infrastructure have been damaged by Russian shelling and to people displaced by Europe’s biggest war in 80 years.
“It’s a way to make a contribution,” says Shpionova, who lives in Kyiv when not on the Food Train. “It’s our job and we know we’re helping people who really need it.”
‘This unique configuration, combining mobility, autonomy and large-scale food production capabilities, makes the Food Train unparalleled in Europe and possibly globally’
— Artur Botchenko, project manager, Ukrzaliznytsia state railway company
With its generators and onboard tanks of filtered water, the train can operate independently for up to a week and plies Ukraine’s vast rail network to get to where it is needed most. During its first year in service, the train has spent time in Kharkiv – which is only 35km from the Russian border – and other frequently shelled cities near the front line, including Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Izium.
Since embarking on its maiden journey in November 2023, the train has delivered well over a million meals. On an average day its staff put together about 4,000 food boxes but – as when heavy Russian missile strikes caused long blackouts in Kharkiv in March this year – they can make three times that number.
“The Food Train was built to support the Ukrainian population in de-occupied territories, frontline regions, during blackouts and in other emergency situations,” says Artur Botchenko, who manages the project for Ukrzaliznytsia, the Ukrainian state railway company.
Construction of the train began in January 2023, and it took about eight months to repair and convert six ageing passenger and cargo wagons to the purpose, with funding from the US-based Howard G Buffett Foundation.
“This unique configuration, combining mobility, autonomy and large-scale food production capabilities, makes the Food Train unparalleled in Europe and possibly globally,” says Botchenko, who also co-ordinates civilian evacuations for Ukrzaliznytsia.
More than four million people have fled their hometowns by train since Russia launched its all-out invasion in February 2022, and regular passenger services still run day and night between Kyiv and cities close to a front line that arcs for some 1,200km from the northern Sumy region, through Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the southeast.
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Despite suffering frequent Russian missile attacks – as when more than 50 people were killed and scores injured in an April 2022 strike on Kramatorsk station – Ukraine’s rail network has played a key role in its resilience, by delivering western arms and ammunition, bringing foreign leaders to Kyiv and other cities, evacuating wounded soldiers and civilians and moving fuel, food and other vital cargo around a country bigger than mainland France.
“We’re proud of how the railways have kept going,” Shpionova says, as boxes of ready meals are passed down from the train to waiting volunteers and she opens the door between a kitchen carriage and the staff’s living quarters.
It is a sleeping car made up of near-standard cabins containing four berths, with the addition of a shower and laundry room and a Starlink satellite internet service that provides stable communications even in areas without power or phone coverage.
“We’re a real little community,” Shpionova says of cooks and maintenance staff on the train, who come from towns and cities across Ukraine.
Outside, train manager Vitaly Dudyk slides back wagon doors – covered in graffiti-style paintings of frying bacon and eggs and oozing ham-and-cheese toasties – to reveal the water tanks, refrigerators and industrial generators that allow the train to work in places where Russia’s invasion has made something as simple as preparing a meal impossible.
By 10am the cooks have already put in a six-hour shift and have at least four more hours ahead. “How do we relax at the end of the day?” Shpionova says. “We sleep.”
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