Life at the end of the tracks

The tracks end at Kalach, home to just a dozen people, all of them adults.

In Kalach there are no telephones and no mobile reception. Electricity has only been supplied for a few hours in the evening for about the past decade.

Still, that has improved the quality of life for Sergei, 62.

"It used to get pretty boring," says Sergei, who cares for his mother, 86, the village’s oldest resident. "I'd be going to bed at 8pm, tossing and turning."

Most of the residents of Kalach, the youngest of whom is aged 34, are self-sufficient. Bread arrives by train. The cows have now gone, replaced by sheep.

"We grow our own food," adds Sergei, speaking in a room with traditional religious icons hanging on the wall. "Potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers. What else do we need?"

All of a sudden he jumps up, leaves the room and brings back an accordion, playing a tune his father taught him. That kind of spontaneous hospitality was typical of the people I met along the railway.

An estimated 90 percent of Sverdlovsk region's population of 4.5 million live in its cities. Life in remote rural areas means making the best of things.

The isolation of these communities makes healthcare a difficulty. One resident gave birth to her son Yegor, now 6, in the train on the way to hospital in Alapayevsk.

It takes about eight hours to travel the full 150 km of the line. En route is the town of Sankin, population 600, where Kalach residents get their post delivered and, for some, collect their state pensions once a month. Clothes sellers arrive in town that day.