At Romanian stations, the person who authorises a train’s departure wears a red cap. Travellers long ago nicknamed these dispatchers “Little Red Riding Hoods,” and it is that figure — together with the small, exact theatre of the departure order — that Horst Klein photographed across years of rail travel through the country.

Klein, a German photographer, works both on the platform and at the window. His dispatchers appear sometimes strict and orderly, sometimes nearly indifferent in carrying out their duty; between such encounters the book gives itself over to the landscapes sliding past, so that the sequence becomes a rail journey through a Romania that is already receding. Cataloguing for the volume attaches it to poetry, paired images and the figure of the Zeitzeuge, the witness — an accurate description of work that prefers observation to argument.

BUMMBUMM BOOKS published the book in 2025 as a German-language hardcover of 140 pages, in an edition limited to 300 copies. The publisher describes a stitched binding and blind embossing: quiet decisions, but ones suited to material about uniformed labour and the ordinary poetry of a timetable.

For collectors, the interest lies as much in what the book documents as in how it is made. Romania’s older railway culture — the red caps, the departure order issued to a named individual, the specific relation between one official and one train — belongs to the kind of working world that photographs tend to outlast. A run of 300 copies places that record in very few hands, and the book’s structure treats the material with the seriousness of a long-term project rather than a travelogue. It is a considered acquisition for shelves holding European documentary photography of the past two decades.