MARCO CARLONE

Pozor Vlak

From the coasts of Albania to the mountains of Transcarpathia, a long fil-rouge ties up lives of people in the remote and unspoiled regions of Balkans and Eastern Europe: it’s the railway.

In this part of Europe, trains play a key role for social life, even if infrastructures and rolling stock are mostly old and outdated. In some villages of the Dinaric Alps, of Romanian flatlands or among Bulgarian hills, trains still are the only means of transport and represent the only window on the rest of the world.

Many villages are actually born thanks to trains, and even in the most remote stations passengers constantly get on and off. Thousands of people work in and around trains: here humans run the railway, not computers. The relation between travel time and distance becomes sometimes disproportionate, and passengers feel each kilometre.

Trains in Eastern Europe are fair: there is room for all budgets and travellers, also chickens can get on board. Wagons run among beauty and ugliness, making no distinctions between pristine nature and industrial giants that flow out of the windows. Second hand rolling stock bought at a low price in the Western countries or even traded with raw materials: that’s the roughing backbone of Eastern railways, In the Balkans, each station has hundreds of stories to tell.

This is a 8 years project that brings together pictures taken in 10 countries. The project shows the peculiar everyday life around the local rails, and the most extravagant stories of station masters and passengers, which always run on the slowest, creaky and shaky trains.

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