Every day, at 7.30am, Leila packs her bags and hops on a train to go to work. She gets off nine hours later, but that’s flexible - as an informal seller, the train is her shop - passengers are her customers and sluggish sales mean she stays on the wagons for longer. In her seventies, Leila has been selling snacks and newspapers on the trains for the last ten years after her husband, the family’s sole breadwinner, died. Her regular itinerary takes her to the resort town of Borjomi, in central Georgia, from Ksani, the closest station to Dzalisi, her village.

The wagons crawling on that route are of a suburban train, better known as the elektrichka of Soviet memory. Currently 16 elektrichkas are in service in Georgia and provide an essential cheap and easily accessible means of transport - a ticket of GEL 2 ($ 0.75) takes you all the way through the 160 km between the capital of Tbilisi to Borjomi while for GEL 4 ($ 1.50) a passenger can travel from the capital to Kutaisi, Georgia’s third biggest city which lies 230km away.