The former siding No. 5 appeared with the opening of the Katerynynska Railway and took its name from the surname of the landowner Fursov, who donated his allotments for the building of the rail road. The name took hold and has not changed down to our own day. In recent decades the only train that stops at the platform is the Avdiivka-Chaplyne suburban train.
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| The Fursove halt |
There are no settlements in the immediate vicinity of the halt, and passengers getting off the suburban train are very few indeed. For some residents of the village of Novopidhorodne in the Synelnykove district of the Dnipropetrovsk region, a distance of a little more than 1 kilometre is nonetheless shorter than the way from halt No. 15. The village of Kolona-Mezhova, lying 2.5 kilometres to the west, has its own platform, the 364 km. The slightly lonely wayside halt has an addition of its own — a residential sector situated a little more than 1 kilometre to the west.
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| Fursove. Dwelling houses for railway workers |
The dwelling houses, painted in the traditional railway reddish-brown, with their flowering gardens and flower beds, vegetable plots, hens and dogs, look like a charming khutir in the middle of empty country.
The transport workers' settlement is the same age as the iron main line. The walls of the former railway barracks are laid of hewn natural stone and are 90 centimetres thick. The corners and the door and window openings are finished with architraves and painted with white lime, which shapes the style of the building.
The large house held more than living quarters. Two rooms housed the «red corner», set aside for agitation and educational work and also for settling production matters. At present the communal space is taken up by hunters, for their meetings and for storing the feed with which they supply the inhabitants of the surrounding hunting grounds in the cold season.
The houses are heated with Donbas coal, and water has to be drawn from a well 10 metres deep.
A wall benchmark is set on the house, used for determining the heights of the earth's surface. 350 metres from the wayside halt lies a Scythian kurgan, the highest point of the former Mezhova district of the Dnipropetrovsk region.
In the years of the Hitlerite occupation fierce fighting was waged on the approaches to the Dnipro and for the taking of the railway tracks. The German invaders shot railway workers by the house, as the bullet pockmarks testify.
In the shelterbelt lies buried a trackwalker by the surname of Osinnii, a resident of the village of Raipole, who was shot by the fascists.
A dynasty of railway workers, the Shuranov and Sheveliov families, has lived in the 2-flat and 4-flat dwelling houses since the 1950s. The founders of the line were Serhii Martynovych and Vira Yakymivna Shuranov. In those years siding No. 5 had 3 railway tracks, a yard for loading wagons and a 200-metre passenger platform. The passenger building held a waiting hall, a ticket office and a shop. Servicing the wayside halt took a good many working hands, and the children who grew up beside the steel track inherited their parents' trade. Halyna Serhiivna Sheveliova recalls that the railway collective was always disciplined and well co-ordinated, and that respect for the profession could be felt. This hereditary railway worker remembers all her colleagues from Raipole and Novopidhorodne by surname and speaks of them with gratitude.
Since 2014, with the cancellation of trains and the fall in freight figures, much has changed on the «iron road». But Fursove remains an unbroken link in the great transport system. I thank Halyna Serhiivna for her hospitality and for her account of the Fursove passenger platform, the former siding No. 5.
This story is also available in Ukrainian: Пасажирська платформа Фурсове. Історія роз'їзду № 5
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