The station master was the person in charge of railway station

Train station

A train station, also called a railroad station or railway station and often shortened to just station,"Station" is commonly understood to mean "train station" unless otherwise qualified. This is evident from dictionary entries e.g...

s, in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 and some other countries, before the modern age. He would manage the other station employees

Employment

Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as:- Employee :...

 and would have responsibility for safety and the efficient running of the station. The term is still sometimes used in large stations, although it has generally been replaced by station manager.

Invariably, he would be provided with a substantial house

House

A house is a building or structure that has the ability to be occupied for dwelling by human beings or other creatures. The term house includes many kinds of different dwellings ranging from rudimentary huts of nomadic tribes to free standing individual structures...

 and, in rural

Rural

Rural areas or the country or countryside are areas that are not urbanized, though when large areas are described, country towns and smaller cities will be included. They have a low population density, and typically much of the land is devoted to agriculture...

 communities

Community

The term community has two distinct meanings:*a group of interacting people, possibly living in close proximity, and often refers to a group that shares some common values, and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household...

, would have significant social standing

Social stratification

In sociology the social stratification is a concept of class, involving the "classification of persons into groups based on shared socio-economic conditions ... a relational set of inequalities with economic, social, political and ideological dimensions."...

.

Notably in the Beeching cuts

Beeching Axe

The Beeching Axe or the Beeching Cuts are informal names for the British Government's attempt in the 1960s to reduce the cost of running British Railways, the nationalised railway system in the United Kingdom. The name is that of the main author of The Reshaping of British Railways, Dr Richard...

 of the 1960s many of these small stations were closed and the station master's house, along with other railway property, sold off. Typically, these buildings retained their original name and in many communities the Station Master's House can still be found as a private dwelling

Dwelling

Dwelling, as well as being a term for a house, or for living somewhere, or for lingering somewhere, is a philosophical concept which was developed by Martin Heidegger. Dwelling is about making yourself at home where the home itself is a building that is a house...

 or converted into a restaurant

Restaurant

A restaurant is an establishment which prepares and serves food and drink to customers in return for money. Meals are generally served and eaten on premises, but many restaurants also offer take-out and food delivery services...

.

In literature

In 1831, The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin

The Tales of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin

The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin is a series of 5 short stories and a fictional editorial introduction by Russian author Aleksandr Pushkin. The collection is opened with the editorial, in which Pushkin pretends to be the publisher of Belkin's tales...

, a series of 5 short stories by Aleksandr Pushkin

Aleksandr Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature....

, was published. One of the stories is called The Station Master. However this is nothing to do with the railway (it was written before the first railway was built in Russia), but was about a man whose position, also called Stationmaster in translation, was to change horse

Horse

The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus, or the wild horse. It is a single-hooved mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, single-toed animal of today...

s and arrange accommodation for travellers on the long road routes across Russia.