Ghost train

'My London' website writes about an interesting phenomenon of 'London's ghost trains': "The legal procedures to close a railway line in the UK are so complex that it is cheaper to run a token 'ghost train' down the line once per day, week or month. These trains often run empty because they don't always appear on maps and timetables, hence the nickname 'ghost trains'." What a waste!

As a second-year student at Kharkiv University, I took a summer job as a conductor of the train that ran from Novorossiysk on the Russian Black Sea coast to Kaliningrad in the Baltics - a 48-hour journey via Kharkiv, from where the train originated. In modern geographical terms, it went across four independent states: Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Lithuania. As such, it has now joined the long list of 'ghost trains', extinguished by the ongoing war.