THE ODESSA-KYIV sleeper departs, as it has done for as long as anyone remembers, to the retro crackle of Leonid Utyosov’s “By the Black Sea”. The Soviet-era number is a nostalgic ode to Odessa’s sacrifice during the second world war. “My friend is young / And lies burned by battle / No wonder his wreath is golden / And made a city of heroes.” But a walk along the train suggests the jazz classic has plenty of contemporary resonance. Carriage number one, a hospital car, is transporting injured soldiers from front lines in Mykolaiv and beyond. You can’t see much, because, like the rest of the train, the car travels in darkness. That is a wartime precaution to avoid becoming a target. But if you put your ear to the locked carriage door, you can make out groans.

Natalya, the attendant in charge of carriage seven, says the hospital cars have become a regular feature of the train, attached to the train perhaps every second day. The soldiers are met halfway in Vinnytsia, and transferred to ambulances when the train draws in at around 4am. With few passengers now making their way in between Odessa and Kyiv, it gave the train an extra reason to operate, Natalya suggested. But it is not the only reason. The trains are fast becoming the arteries of Ukraine’s wartime being, moving refugees and exports west, and critical humanitarian supplies back to the centre. Tickets have in effect become voluntary, and the system runs almost entirely on emergency state subsidies, which last month cost 18bn hryvnia ($612m).

The vital nature of the railways has transformed the way they are run. When the war started on February 24th, the system’s management triggered a secret plan worked out in advance for a national emergency. Female staff with families were evacuated abroad. Train drivers were recalled from retirement. Meanwhile a core management team packed suitcases for an as yet unclear period on the road. That central team has been in charge of strategy for the past 22 days, making decisions from aboard randomly chosen trains to avoid being hit by the Russians. Operational decisions have mostly been delegated to station managers, who work with military police around the clock to ensure as safe a passage for staff and passengers as they can.

Petro Stetsuk, the controller at Kyiv’s central station, is but one of a number of war heroes keeping the railways running. The former head of Ukraine’s transport police and a 30-year veteran of the railways, 60-year-old Mr Stetsuk has been camped alongside the tracks for the past three weeks. It has been a constant battle, fought alongside a slimmed-down staff of 60 railway workers. They have repaired the station after it was damaged by a falling rocket; turned the station’s east vestibule into a soup kitchen, field hospital and psychological clinic; and put more than 2m frantic fellow Ukrainians on evacuation trains to the west. Passenger flows are now less than the highs of late February, when close to 80,000 flowed through the station daily. But the work continues to be taxing. “My main job is keeping my people calm so they can make good decisions,” Mr Stetsuk says. He laughed: “Plus, of course, finding the train drivers, the carriage assistants, preparing the trains, calling the end stations, and making sure people aren’t blown up en route.”

The task of determining the safest route to travel is done by a separate team called the dvizhentsy, the “moving people”. They work from an undisclosed location in Kyiv, and are in constant contact with the military and security services. The list of tracks and stations they can use has been getting smaller with every day, as Russian forces etch their way farther into Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts in the east. It is not just a logistical puzzle: more than 30 staff have been killed and countless more injured. On March 13th an evacuation train was shelled just before it was due to pick up 100 children. One attendant died. There have been plenty of near misses too. On February 26th three rockets landed near a train coming in from Warsaw. The driver, remarkably, continued on to Kyiv. There has not been a single case of a train driver refusing to work, a spokesman told The Economist.

Pulling into Kyiv after eight hours on the tracks, the locomotive’s operator predicted that this would continue. He said that Ukraine’s train drivers were “made of tough stuff” and had seen a lot over the years. But the war was testing them too. “Can you imagine driving a train through the night in the pitch dark?” he asked. “Usually, I’d be afraid of hitting something on the tracks. But if I’m honest I’m now much more worried about something hitting me.” ■

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