Visitors to major cities in former Warsaw Pact countries will likely find a vocational ed program that's W.C. Fields' worst nightmare: a rail line run entirely by children.
All of the work on a Children's Railway, from selling tickets to shunting trains, is performed by youngsters. They're usually between the ages of 10 and 14 and the work is usually unpaid. Still, it's not a flagrant violation of child labor laws. Kids actually compete for highly coveted spots running the railroad and they're excused from school for their work.
Begun as "Pioneer Railroads" in the 1930s and expanded in the 1950s, the narrow-gauge railways were a uniquely Soviet and Eastern-bloc phenomenon meant to prepare teenagers for future careers working as railroad engineers, ticket agents and car attendants. Think of it as a kind of Future Business Leaders for the proletariat.
Kids even moved freight on the Children's Railways in Svobodnenskaya and Vilnius, which were used to transport timber during World War II and coal during the 1950s. Today, kids still run the rails from Armenia to Uzbekistan, though most railways are now privately funded. Perhaps the best known is in Budapest, Hungary, where kids run trains on a seven mile long track with minimal adult supervision.
"Tickets are sold by a young participant at the booking office, arriving and departing trains are announced by a child's voice over the loudspeaker, engine drivers are given permission to start their trains by another child, and it also children conducting and keeping passengers informed in the carriages," according to the railway office. "Behind the scenes, the sometimes complex work of managing trains, booking the line, operating signaling and implementing safety measures are also done by Children's Railway participants."
That smiling kid in the photo runs the rails in Minsk, where a 2.8 mile children's railway has replicas of real-life railway stations complete with marble and granite floors and walls.
Photo: Flickr/bolshakov
