Station master's house at Cotehill railway station.

The station master was the person in charge of railway stations, in the United Kingdom and some other countries, before the modern age.^[1] He would manage the other station employees and would have responsibility for safety and the efficient running of the station.

Invariably, he would be provided with a substantial house^[2] and, in rural communities, would have significant social standing.^[3]

Notably in the Beeching cuts of the 1960s many of these small stations were closed and the station master's house, along with other railway property, sold off. Typically, these buildings retained their original name and in many communities the Station Master's House can still be found as a private dwelling^[3] or converted into a restaurant.^[4]

[edit] In literature

In 1831, The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, a series of 5 short stories by Aleksandr Pushkin, was published. One of the stories is called The Station Master. However this is nothing to do with the railway (it was written before the first railway was built in Russia), but was about a man whose position, also called Stationmaster in translation, was to change horses and arrange accommodation for travellers on the long road routes across Russia.

[edit] References