Meiningen - Meiningen

Early 1980s. Employees of Mitropa-Fahrbetrieb Berlin at their workplace: dining cars on passenger trains operated by the GDR railway company Deutsche Reichsbahn. Their shift begins at 3 a.m. at Meiningen station and ends late at night at the same place. A shift lasts five days in a row, with a night-time rest period of just four hours. After five days, they receive compensatory time off. The staff includes a cook and a waiter. The dining car is not a factory assembly line. Working on the train is varied, and that's a good thing, they say. The small brigade – GDR jargon for crew – gets on well. Directors Gudrun Steinbrück and Julia Kunert document them during one shift. The journey goes from Meiningen past Wittenberg to Berlin and back again. On this route, the passengers are in a different mood than on journeys from Dresden to Berlin, their contributors explain. The cook says that he would prefer to make meals from scratch. Yet the latest trend is to get pre-cooked meals. Just heating them up is not to his taste.