The cute little train at the end of the world with a brutal history

The world ends on a bog, a slumped mountain and stands of beech trees. A gravelly river is littered with tree trunks. Dandelions provide the only pop of colour in this grey-green landscape. The wind’s cold fingers probe the upturned collar of my polar jacket.

The Southern Fuegian Railway, more aptly called the End of the World Train.Credit: Alamy

I’m near Ushuaia on South America’s southern extremity, in the last corner of Argentina corralled by the right angles of the Chilean border, although borders seem like a laughable human conceit here. The snow-scraped Chilean mountains look like the snow-scraped Argentine mountains, and this wilderness scoffs at boundaries.

Still, we humans have a way of insinuating ourselves into even the remotest places, so here I am, boarding a train so dinky you’d think it belonged to a domesticated English landscape. The steam locomotives were indeed made in Britain.

A station platform “in the middle of nowhere”.Credit: Getty Images

An accordion tango is playing over the loudspeakers. The wooden carriage interiors are tight. The seats, cushioned in pale blue, leave me sitting knee-to-knee with fellow passengers across a tiny table, jammed against a window fogged with our breaths.

The little red train probes this chilly Patagonian terrain with caution, groaning and rattling, and so slow I could jog beside it if it weren’t for the swampy meadows and tangle of trees.

Even here, at the end of the world, we humans have attempted to conquer nature. We soon clank across a valley where the forest has been felled, leaving stumps sticking up like tombstones. From their height, you can tell which trees were chopped down in winter, when snow raised the men wielding axes a metre or two upwards.

Onwards, and beyond the window are grazing horses, two hikers resting against their packs beside a trail, a silvery river. Trees and rocks are green with moss or brown with lichen in this damp sub-Antarctic environment.

Just beyond the national park boundary, we stop at Macarena station, a platform in the middle of nowhere. We have 15 minutes to leap off and take photos of the train and a small waterfall once used to refill the steam locomotive’s tanks.

Locals in convict costumes engage passengers in silly souvenir poses, as if the convict history of this place is entertainment. Back on the train, the commentary piped through earphones tells a different story of brutality and forced labour.

Steaming through the Tierra del Fuego National Park, Ushuaia.Credit: Adobe

Patagonia was Argentina’s Van Diemen’s Land, known as the Siberia of the South. In 1896, a high-security prison was established in Ushuaia, which today can be visited as a frigid and forbidding museum that chronicles its appalling, deliberately dehumanising conditions.

The inmates were forced to build Ushuaia, which was rapidly expanding with settlers. They constructed the railway in 1909 to access timber, used as fuel and building material. Trains ran until the prison was closed in 1947, and the railway line was damaged by an earthquake shortly afterwards.

In 1994, an eight-kilometre section of track, which runs partly into Tierra del Fuego National Park, was restored. Although officially called the Southern Fuegian Railway, it’s more romantically marketed as the End of the World Train.

Music plays in between the commentary like the stirring scores you used to hear at the sunset end of cowboy movies. The ride is presented as a journey of nostalgia, but there’s nothing to be nostalgic about in this brutal tale of invasion of indigenous land, convict misery and environmental destruction.

The horrible history is set against the forbidding landscape, with only glimpses of distant, snow-dusted Andean peaks providing the soul with a bit of uplift. As we rattle into the terminal, I can only conclude that tourists are curious creatures, ever ready to make an entertainment out of the most terrible tales of the past.

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The writer was on a pre-cruise extension with Aurora Expeditions prior to an Antarctic journey. A two-day, one-night stay in Ushuaia is priced from $US320 ($490) a person twin share, including hotel, breakfast, Tierra del Fuego National Park half-day tour with End of the World Train, and national park entrance fee. See auroraexpeditions.com.au