woman in orange vest in front of house with porch around it.
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The colorful ‘train ladies’ of Ukraine

Meet the rail safety officers who preside over the country’s vibrant railway crossing houses and other cultural touchstones.

Railway attendant Inna Oleksandrivna Manoylenko, at work on the outskirts of Kyiv, is one of hundreds of Ukrainian railway employees who signal to passing trains and keep impatient people off the tracks.
ByDaniel Stone
Photographs bySasha Maslov
February 04, 2021
7 min read
This story appears in the March 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Many of Sasha Maslov’s best childhood memories are connected to trains. Every vacation, every trip to another city, he’d stare out the window to see the texture of his country in the apartment buildings and shops and cars waiting for the train to pass. And every so often, he’d see a tiny house with a woman standing by it, holding a yellow flag.

“Ukrainian railroad ladies,” as Maslov calls them in his portrait series, are a cultural tradition that feels as old as rail travel in Ukraine. The workers are tasked with sending flag-based signals to conductors of approaching trains. A folded yellow flag means all clear ahead. An unfolded flag means reduce speed and proceed with caution. A red flag—or a flare shot into the air—means to stop moving entirely, as a hazard is ahead.

woman in orange vest between house and flowerbed.
woman in uniform and hat sitting between two windows with red geraniums.
woman in sunglasses with sunflowers.
young blond woman in uniform sitting against pink curtains.
Nataliia Yuriivna Pylypenko passes time between trains by tending the garden at this trackside house, which is owned by the Ukrainian railway.
Photograph by SASHA MASLOV
woman in uniform by small blue house with fancy iron porch railing.
Railway worker Svitlana Oleksiivna Yevstihnieieva operates the Poltava-South station in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava.
woman in winter uniform and projector light and bicycle near the porch.
Kononivka Station, 113 km, is one of many stations known by their name and distance from a main city. That usually means Kyiv, but some retain their Soviet-era distance measure from Moscow.
woman in uniform standing on stairs of green and blue house.
No two railway houses look the same, but common traits are their small size—a single-story may be about 225 square feet—and their location near rail crossings. The workers’ lives revolve around train schedules.
metal whistle hanging on window handle.
A whistle hangs in a crossing house at the Sakhnovshchyna station. As a last resort, crossing workers might use such a whistle to warn pedestrians of an approaching train.

Some aspects of rail officer life are changing. The officers are no longer all women, and the Ukraine Railways agency, Ukrzaliznytsia, has expanded its hiring to try to bring more young workers into the unglamorous but stable work.

In a world of high-speed trains and automated crossings, rail attendants today may spend less time signaling to trains than policing and warning motorists. “Ukrainians are notoriously not law-abiding,” Maslov comments. “If there is no watcher, people will go around the barriers to beat a moving train.”

The life can be monastic. In between trains, the workers tend gardens, complete chores, and fill out paperwork. In one house, Maslov saw a notebook in which an attendant had taken down the license plate numbers of cars that ran through barriers. She sent the list to the police.

woman in orange vest standing in front of small blue house with caged porch.
Railway workers like Trofymova Yelena Sergiivna plan their lives around the train schedule.
woman in orange vest in front of tiny one-window blue house under green roof.
Every railway house is different, some showing aspects of architecture particular to their region. The vast majority of occupants are female.
woman in blue uniform showing folded yellow flag.
The color of the flag signals to train operators what lies ahead. A folded yellow flag means to maintain speed. Red signals that a collision may be imminent.
grey phone set with no dial and red hard sticker standing on top of radio transmittal.
Some railway workers still communicate with telephones and radio frequencies.
flue flashlight atop of blue switchboard against blue wall.
At crossing stations like this one in Sakhnovshchyna in eastern Ukraine, flashlights can be used in case of a power outage to warn motorists of a train’s approach.
phone with no dial and folded yellow flag on small table by window.

Crossing houses and their contents hark back to a time before trains could rely on radios and digital communication to boost railway safely.

flowers on the window in bright aqua-blue room.
Ukraine’s colorful crossing houses provide a public service and are a cultural touchstone.
Sasha Maslov's book Ukrainian Railroad Ladies is now available on Amazon.

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