You're reading: Train service cuts disappoint travelers while railway employees fear layoffs

While it was always hard to get train tickets ahead of Christmas holidays, this year many Ukrainians were not even able to find their usual trains.

Ukrzaliznytsia, the country’s railway monopoly, in November cut back trains and stops as a part of a program to eliminate loss-making passenger routes subsidized by the state.

Thousands of passengers have suffered from the changes, while railway employees are fearful of cost-cutting dismissals.

“In fact every locality in Ukraine has already received difficulties with transport communication over the trains’ reduction,” Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, a watchdog wrote to government agencies on Dec. 6.

Ukrzaliznytsia decided to withdraw 23 trains and modify 13 rail routes by the end of 2011, its official report said.

In 2012, the company aims to reduce 25 percent of trains, Kommersant-Ukraine newspaper reported, but this information wasn’t confirmed by the company’s press service. More than 80 percent of Ukrainians prefer travelling through the country by trains, because of price, convenience and safety, according to the poll conducted in 2009.

Ukrzaliznytsia claims that, despite its popularity, passenger trains are unprofitable, prompting it to cut back on the most unprofitable and least-used routes.

“We received about Hr 6 billion losses in passenger sector this year,” the press service officer of Ukrzaliznytsia, who refused to give her name, told the Kyiv Post by phone. “So, the optimization is needed.”

The officer said that nobody in the last 20 years has checked how busy the trains are and which routes are really necessary.

This argument isn’t persuasive to Valeria Terletska, a 20-year-old Kyiv student, who will have to spend another 12 hours to get to her parents’ home in Kherson Oblast.

As Kyiv trains don’t stop in neighboring Armiansk in the northwestern part of Crimea any more, Terletska will have to get off at another station, which is more than 100 kilometers from her destination.

The local city leaders of 24,000-resident Armiansk, along with other northern Crimean cities, appealed to the peninsula’s central government, claiming that the absence of train connections could harm the social and economic life of their region.

The students from Smila city in Cherkasky Oblast also have started sending complaints to the regional railway authorities after a train connecting their city with Kharkiv had been cancelled, the regional newspaper Nova Doba reported.

The students say they will not be able to visit their parents often as the bus ticket to Kharkiv costs Hr 130, in comparison to the Hr 30 they had to pay for a train with their student discount.

Maksym Scherbatiuk, a lawyer with Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, said the railway company in fact earns much thanks to the freight services, where the tariffs are very high. Scherbatiuk said that, as a monopolist, the railway company has a social role in transporting passengers cheaply.

Ukrzaliznytsia is expected to post a net profit of Hr 700 million (about $88 million) in 2011, according to company’s press service.

Economists argue that increasing the train tickets’ price could become a reasonable way to boost profitability of the passenger trains. But the move would be politically unpopular ahead of next year’s parliament elections.

“Tariffs for people on transport or energy are very sensitive issues,” Ildar Gazizullin, an economist of Kyiv’s International Center for Policy Studies said.

Workers on the cancelled routes are worried about being fired and ready to protest, despite the railway officials’ assurance that there are no such plans. “There will be masked staff cuts,” Oleksandr Abrosimov, a labor union official told the Kyiv Post.

“They could dismiss an employee for the tiniest fault now.” Abrosimov expected the number of conductors in his Kharkiv wagon site No. 1 alone to be decreased from 1,300 to 500.

Abrosimov agrees that Ukraine’s railway needs to cut costs. But he believes there are better areas for economizing than decreasing of the number of trains, such as eliminating subsidies to favored groups.

Nashi Hroshi, a nongovernmental organization that monitors state procurement deals, wrote about the numerous cases of suspicious purchases by Ukrzaliznytsia.

One of the most striking examples is buying of 200 cast-iron dustbins for about Hr 5,000 (nearly $625) for each one to supply a train station in Lviv. Another suspicious purchase was the repair of signboards at a Kyiv train station, which cost Hr 796,000 ($99,500). Railway officials denied any wrongdoing.

Gazizullin said non-transparency of cash operations is another reason for financial problems of Ukrzaliznytsia. “It is easy for top and middle management” to misspend money, he said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]