On Sept. 24, in the rear carriage of a train zipping towards Berlin, five members of the Warsaw Dance Combo began to play their instruments.

The carriage had no proper seats. Wicker material lined the walls and ceiling, like entangled vines. Soon, music filled the space.

The Culture Train began in 2016, running on weekends between Berlin and the Polish city Wrocław. It was supposed to run for a few months, but thousands of people applied for tickets. The run was extended to nearly 10 years, with only a break for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Around 130,000 people rode the Culture Train over that near-decade before the train’s weekend runs ended in 2025, largely due to a lack of funding. Now, the train has returned for a short run between Berlin and the Polish capital of Warsaw, paid for by both German and Polish authorities.

On this new run, performances and workshops, such as cooking and singing classes, are held on each five-and-a-half-hour journey between the capital cities. The idea is to fuse German and Polish culture.

After the folk music performance on the Sept. 24 trip, a conductor named Grzegorz Wierus led passengers through a vocal rendition of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

Wierus said: “It’s a European anthem. That’s why [we sang it], it’s about joy,” Wierus said. “So, it was the perfect topic for Kulturzug [the Culture Train] … it’s human connection.”

Culture Train organizer Oliver Spatz took the microphone between performances on the carriage. He told the crowd of curious passengers: “Maybe we are getting closer to each other than we [believed]we would before the start of this journey.”

Spatz said that the Culture Train was launched to address what he called a historic “remoteness” between Germans and Poles. He said this was fueled by negative stereotypes, some dating back to Poland’s communist times and even World War II.

One stereotype was that Poland was rife with crime. “People were afraid to take a car [from Germany] to Poland because there was a stereotype that the car would have been stolen,” Spatz said.

Emilia Kurpiela has ridden the Culture Train at least 10 times. She’s Polish and is married to a German. She said that when she first started regularly traveling to Germany, she experienced prejudice firsthand. Some people, she said, assumed that most Poles strove to live on government handouts. Many assumed that she was a “cheater.”

Speaking to the Culture Train’s influence, Kurpiela said: “I hope that people … will change a little bit their mind about Polish people and Poland. That it’s more modern and not so post-Soviet.”

The Culture Train’s mission of unity goes far beyond singing and dancing. Spatz said that after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he sent the train to Poland to pick up Ukrainian refugees. He estimates that the train transported up to 10,000 refugees in total over multiple trips.

“It was very chaotic,” he said, “because we came to the station in Wrocław and announced: ‘There will be a train to Berlin. Who wants to go?’ Suddenly, we had 500 people on the train. A lot of them had children. There were a lot of animals, pets, on the train.”

It’s unclear where the Culture Train goes from here. The organizers got funding from the German and Polish governments for eight new journeys, with this new run set to end on Oct. 10.

Spatz said he’s optimistic that the Culture Train will return again in some form. He added that the train was a small but important signifier of the importance of openness, cultural exchange and freedom in Europe.

“The sense of freedom connects Germany and Poland,” he said. “They have experienced the opposite. They have experienced fascism. They have experienced war. They have experienced the Iron Curtain. People know that there’s a reason to take over responsibility to carry on with freedom.”