Riding the Rails
I’ve had a love of trains since my childhood. My father worked on a small commuter rail line running between Chicago and South Bend, Indiana, so I literally grew up riding the rails. As with everything else, some of the details are a little different in Ukraine, but the essential allure and romance of rail travel remains the same. On the longer trips – anything over four or five hours – there are three different classes of passenger cars.
(Train and station in Carpathian Mts)
The most expensive is a two passenger sleeping compartment called luxe, priced well beyond the reach of all but the most wealthy Ukrainians, and not available on every train route. The middle ground is a four bed private compartment, two up and two down, known as coupe. For me, this is the way to go. It affords a measure of privacy not found in the third and cheapest method called plascart. The vast majority of Ukrainians do their train travel in plascart but unless you are someone who likes sleeping in an open hostel-like environment with forty-seven other people and you’re extremely hard of smelling, I wouldn’t recommend it. Certainly it makes for the most interesting and perhaps authentic travel experience, but I’ve tried it twice and all I’ve gained is a major case of sleep deprivation.
