Keeping her in her Place: Women loco-pilots negotiating masculine spatialities in Indian Railways

Indian Railways are known to be one of the world’s largest railway networks (Kerr 2011). Train drivers, or loco-pilots, are among the most significant workers who keep this network running. In the Indian Railways, women started entering the loco-piloting profession in the 1980 s. As many women continued to join over the decades, one of the biggest challenges they faced was adapting to infrastructures that were originally designed for male workers. Even now, be it the control room, the engine cab, or even the resting rooms and toilets, hardly any spaces crucial to the loco-pilot’s work envision women as the primary users. As a result, women’s experiences of these masculine spaces involve constant negotiation with authorities, as well as social biases, to be able to drive trains and move ahead. This gets further complicated with the extremely mobile nature of the job, wherein women are constantly expected to move through different areas, thus bringing into question how the spatiality of mobility influences and gets influenced by gender. Using data gathered through non-participant observation, in-depth interviews, and secondary literature, this paper seeks to document and present women loco-pilots’ experiences of their work spaces, in order to throw light on the gendered relationship between spatiality and mobility in the context of transport workers’ lives.