Glory to the rails

Three years into the war, the trains are running on time.

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Before his death in 2010, the historian Tony Judt began a book on the history of railways, to be titled Locomotion. The essays that were published in The New York Review of Books give us an idea of his views on the subject, as does the posthumous book Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012), a dialogue with his friend and fellow historian Timothy Snyder. Judt mourned the particular decline of the railways in Britain and the United States. Since 1987 he had lived in New York, but he was born in London and trains were an important part of his childhood. His interests as a historian gravitated toward Europe, be it French intellectuals or Czech dissidents; his private Europe — « My Europe » — was, as he put it, « measured in train time. » Trains in continental Europe, unlike their British and American counterparts, had persevered, mostly, but still their future needed bolstering: « If we throw away the railway stations and the lines leading to them — as we began to do in the 1950s and 1960s », Judt wrote, « we shall be throwing away our memory of how to live the confident civic life. »¹

Twelve years after Judt’s death, his insights into that confident civic life — and our ability to remember it — were enlivened by the most dramatic, most earth-shaking events in Europe since WWII: the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainians left the country during the first weeks of the invasion; four million were evacuated by train, including a million children. Thousands of dogs, cats and other pets, too. This occurred despite the shelling of railways and stations (a significant portion of which would end up under Russian occupation). Despite all this, Ukrainian Railways proved to be outstandingly inventive in saving people’s (and pets’) lives. Soon after the invasion, remarkably, it even managed to get back on schedule. And soon after the invasion, two managers of Ukrainian Railways made a bet with Polish friends from a big NGO that Ukrainian trains would maintain their 95% on-time-arrival rate. So reports the Ukrainian journalist Marichka Paplauskaite in an as-yet-untranslated book on Ukrainian trains. Spoiler: they won. Some days the rate is 99%. In Poland, Paplauskaite tells us, the rail system’s on-time-arrival rate is 80%. In Germany, Deutsche Bahn barely reaches 70%.