He had gained valuable experience by getting acquainted with the work of the largest sorting yards of the Western Siberian Railway - Inskaya and Altaiskaya.
[2] In 1977, at the age of 28, Starostenko took his first managerial position, as the chief engineer of the Vhodnaya marshalling yard near Omsk.
Together with Minister Nikolai Aksyonenko, he took part in resolving the crisis with the miners who blocked the Trans-Siberian Railway.
On 16 September, due to upheavals in the Government of Russia, he was dismissed and reappointed as head of the West Siberian Railway.
Under Starostenko, the first suburban passenger companies in Russia appeared on the ZSZhD on shares with local authorities.
In 2003, Starostenko established the tradition of conferring honorary titles "Enterprise of Efficient Technologies and Aesthetics".
A fundamental modernization of the infrastructure and 10 large marshaling yards has begun, and several innovative and investment projects have been implemented.
[3] In October 2008, Starostenko reorganized the Moscow Railwayman newspaper, for the first time abandoning the departmental principle in the selection of leadership personnel and inviting political scientist and international journalist Vladimir Shelkov to the post of editor-in-chief.
Throughout his career, Starostenko was distinguished by an expressive, tough, wayward character, and a penchant for harsh strong-willed decisions.
In this position, he advocated partial decentralization of management, the transfer of several powers to road chiefs, the creation of information and control computer systems, and the transition to "unmanned" technologies that exclude the influence of the human factor.
Sending his adviser to a well-deserved rest Yakunin presented Starostenko with the second badge "Honorary Railway Worker".
[6] On 1 October 2018, a scientific and practical conference dedicated to Starostenko was held in the building of the Moscow Railway Administration, and a memorial plaque in his honor was opened in the "Gallery of Glory".