Along the Railways of Moldova

Ghirbova is a tiny dot along one of the main migratory routes from Moldova towards the East. The World Bank estimates that about 40% of remittances to Moldova are from Russia.

Valentin sits alone in the Ghirbova station building when we encounter him. “There will not be any trains coming for many hours ahead,” he says. Valentin is the stationmaster and the only person working here.  The rare passenger trains stop in the middle of the night, either moving towards or arriving from Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

He is keen on showing us the waiting room where curtains are filtering the sunlight, giving a light blue tone to the environment, and the control room with its panels. An old, bulky telephone sits in the middle of his desk and, on a board, a large notice sign in Russian saying ‘Safety first’. The ticket office is closed. This small village, situated in the Ocnița district, is crossed by railroad tracks heading first to Ukraine, only a few kilometres away, then to Russia.

Ghirbova is a tiny dot along one of the main migratory routes from Moldova towards the East. The Chisinau-Moscow and the Chisinau-Saint Petersburg trains are a cheaper, although time-consuming, option for migrants, compared to flights. The World Bank estimates that about 40% of remittances to Moldova are from Russia.

The station of Rogojeni, in Floresti district, looks almost deserted from the outside. In this North Eastern region of the country, the railway is mostly used by freight trains, mainly transporting unrefined sunflower oil towards Balti and beyond.

The waiting room seems to be frozen in time. A large map of the Soviet Union railways stands on one of the walls. On the opposite side, there is the eerie, incongruous sight of dozens of drawings with captions of how to react in the event of a nuclear attack: how to protect yourself from radiation, which food to consume, where to find clean water and which actions the emergency teams will carry out to safeguard the population. Fortunately these warnings are of no use today but no one seems to have bothered to remove them. The only passenger trains operating on this route go from Mateuti, a village on the right bank of the Nistru River, to Balti, the largest city in Northern Moldova.

In the nearby ticket office, a sign carrying a sentence taken by Cervantes’ Don Quixote acts as a reminder for the absent passengers: “Nothing costs us so little and is valued as much as courtesy.”