The special trains that are saving lives in Ukraine

Gary Essex reports on the trains helping the Ukrainian war effort - the Médecins Sans Frontières Hospital Train and the Warren Buffett Foundation Food Train.

In this article:

• Ukrzaliznytsia increased domestic production, converting rolling stock and developing wagons, supported by government-funded local manufacturing.
• Médecins Sans Frontières and UZ created hospital trains to evacuate and treat critically wounded war patients.
• The Warren Buffett Foundation-funded Food Train produces 10,000 meals daily, aiding regions with damaged infrastructure and logistics.

Since 2022, the workshops of Ukrzaliznytsia (Ukrainian Railways, or UZ) have been taking on new areas of production, as well as converting existing rolling stock for specialist applications.

Before the initial Russian invasion of Crimea & Donbas in 2014, many components were purchased from Russia.

However, domestic production has now replaced these imports, with a large number of components - from brake shoes to sleepers - being produced in house by UZ. The government has provided 260 UAH (£5 million) to support the localisation of production by 160 Ukrainian suppliers.

The production of new wagons has also been increased, despite the loss of Azovstal and Azovmash wagon production plants in Mariupol (occupied by Russia in May 2022).

The only Ukrainian steelworks producing rail was also based in Mariupol, and so a deal for grant-aided rail was agreed with Japan, with a total of 25,000 tonnes of rail (equivalent to 190km of track, 118 miles) expected to be delivered by the end of 2024.

The supply of rolling stock in Ukraine had been boosted at the start of the invasion, when 15,000 Russian items of rolling stock, belonging to 250 companies, were parked on Ukrainian tracks. The Ukrainian government enacted a law to compulsorily seize Russian assets in Ukraine, and all 15,000 items of stock were added to the UZ fleet.

UZ’s own Karpaty wagon factory built more than 500 wagons in 2023, and has developed five models of grain hopper wagon using newly sourced and domestically produced components - including a number for the US Agency for International Development.

Ukrzaliznytsia has recently ordered 66 carriages from private Ukrainian manufacturer Krukiv Railway Car Manufacturing Plant (KVSZ), which will include facilities for passengers with reduced mobility and have an increased proportion of domestic content. Announcing the latest order on March 1, Ukrzaliznytsia said that more than 80% of the components of the coaches would be made in Ukraine.

UZ plans to overhaul 42 carriages during 2024, along with modernising 15 suburban trains and six carriages for medical evacuation.

The invasion has seen an increased need for accessible carriages and stations, and UZ has implemented plans for ongoing modifications to enable the railways to be fully accessible.

Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, CEO of the Ukrzaliznytsia Passenger Company, stated that “there are already approximately 30,000 amputations - it’s on the scale of World War One. We need accessibility nationwide.”

UZ has purchased 37 rail cars that are wheelchair-accessible, but with more than 2,000 platforms and station stops “it will be a lengthy process”, Pertsovskyi added.

The company has also stepped in to provide more specialised trains, especially for medical evacuation.

It has been helped here by international medical aid charity Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has funded the building of a hospital train to transport critically wounded patients.

Christopher Stokes, head of MSF in Ukraine, explains: “Back in the first week of March, Kyiv was being surrounded and convoys of civilian vehicles were being hit.

“The team I was with had been evacuated to Lviv in the west of Ukraine… but then I noticed that the trains were still working. After a bit of negotiation with the railway company and some authorities, we were loading a train with our existing medical supplies. It left for Kyiv that same night.

“We realised that building a train with an onboard intensive care unit would take time to get right, so to test the concept we started with a ‘basic’ train that could evacuate less critical patients. The carriages still required a lot of modification, and we needed a team of medical staff, but we had it on the rails within weeks. It was the first time MSF had ever tried anything like this.”

MSF equipped and staffed the train to care for patients who needed to be medically evacuated from the war-affected areas of eastern Ukraine, working in collaboration with UZ and Ukraine’s Ministry of Health.

Hospitals near active war zones frequently send out urgent requests for patients to be transferred to hospitals in safer areas of the country.

This is partly to manage their bed capacity as new patients keep coming with war wounds, but also to give the patients the best chance to have the dedicated medical care they need.

The first train, a four-carriage unit, handles these less critical patients. It made its first journey in April 2022, carrying 26 patients from Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro to hospitals in Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv. Most required post-operative care following traumatic injuries.

Between March 31 and May 6 2022, MSF teams evacuated 653 patients. Just over half of those (355 patients) were injured as a direct result of the war.

Dr Albina Zharkova, an MSF doctor who works on board the train, tells RAIL: “With an ambulance, you have room for one or maybe two patients. Trains are more stable than automobile transport, especially for long-distance evacuations.”

The second train, an eight-carriage unit, takes the more critical cases, as it has an onboard intensive care unit. The train can transport up to 42 patients at a time and includes onboard oxygen making facilities and a generator car to power all the medical devices.

MSF Systems Engineer Elvina Motard worked on the project.

“One of the biggest hurdles we faced from the start was oxygen. If you’re transferring intubated intensive care patients, you need to have a large oxygen supply and a specific area of space around each patient. It requires a certain layout. It was clear from the start that there were a lot of complex problems that needed to be solved.

“When we design a hospital, we work hard on the flow and the positioning of everything. How are patients and medical staff going to move around the space? Where does the waste go? We look at all the ins and the outs.

“But on a train, there is one single line of movement, and everything and everybody - patients, medical staff, technical staff, food and waste - has to flow along that line.”

Working with a team from Ukrainian Railways at an undisclosed location in Ukraine, MSF’s team worked to turn eight 1980s carriages into a cross between an ambulance and a state-of-the-art intensive care unit.

“It was a massive challenge, but also intense and inspiring,” says Elvina.

“The four of us from MSF (along with our colleagues in Brussels) brought our experience of medical facilities and of working in emergencies. The 50-or-so Ukrainian Railways workers brought their knowledge of train engineering. Somehow, we had to work together to find solutions and create something that would work for patients and staff.

“There were disagreements, language barriers, and constant interruptions from air raid sirens and evacuations. We worked out that each one of us walked around 13km [eight miles] every day on site - up and down the train and all around.

“It was exhausting, but we worked together, learnt from each other, and never forgot why we were doing it. And after 23 days, we had the medical train we’d envisioned.”

Since the MSF trains were rolled out of the workshops, UZ has gone on to convert another 70 carriages into mobile medical facilities. They are equipped differently depending on medical needs, and trains incorporate auxiliary wagons with power generation and water purification systems, making them fully autonomous and ready for emergencies.

The medical carriages can include oxygen stations, artificial ventilation machines, cardiac monitors and blood transfusion equipment.

Food train

The carriage workshops of UZ also turned their hand to building a kitchen and food preparation areas in the Warren Buffett Foundation-funded Food Train.

This autonomous ‘kitchen on rails’ can produce up to 10,000 hot meals a day in territories where logistics and electricity, gas and water networks have been damaged or destroyed.

The six-car train is staffed by UZ employees and volunteers, and carries a 200KVA generator and 27,000 litres of filtered water onboard. The meals are cooked and packaged on board, then collected by volunteer and community organisations for distribution. The volunteers stay on board the train in a sleeping car, working two weeks on and two off.

The train consists of six vehicles:

• Generator car (400 kW with its own fuelling facilities).
• Refrigerator car with walk-in fridge and freezer.
• Cold kitchen car for food pre-processing.
• Hot kitchen car for cooking meals with four commercial turbofan ovens.
• Sleeping car for the crew with a shower and washing machine.
• Luggage car containing a 27,000-litre water reservoir, with filtration and pumping system.

The Food Train can work autonomously, using its generators and water supply for up to seven days. It delivers hot meals to Ukrainian regions that have suffered serious damage to logistics and power networks, and across liberated territories.

By the end of July 2024, the Food Train had been operating in the Kharkiv region for 145 days, during which time the train’s team prepared almost 750,000 portions of food, which was delivered to evacuation trains, hospitals, nursing homes, resettlement sites for internally displaced Ukrainians, and communities.

Closer ties with other European operators

As well as producing stock for the domestic market and the war effort, the rolling stock industry in Ukraine is developing closer links with other European operators, and producing stock that will operate across the break of gauge barrier.

In December 2023, UZ unveiled a variable gauge hopper wagon designed for the export of grain and other loose bulk food products.

The wagon, a 19-8005-U model, operates on Ukrainian 1520mm gauge as well as standard gauge, and has a carrying capacity of 70 tonnes with a design speed of 120kph (75mph). Most of the components and materials for it are produced domestically in Ukraine.

In July 2024, Lithuanian state-owned rail freight operator LTG Cargo placed orders for 500 grain hopper wagons with Ukrainian manufacturers Karpaty and KVBZ. Planned for delivery in 2024 and 2025, they are expected to be used for moving Ukrainian grain for export via the Lithuanian port of Klaipėda.

In January 2024, the Ukrainian government asked the National Security and Defence Council to introduce a bundle of sanctions against Russia for the next 50 years, including a ban on the import of Russian rolling stock.

With developments of new standard gauge connections and gauge changing stock, the focus of Ukrainian rail freight is now firmly looking in a Western direction.

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