Paul Theroux rode trains from the snow of Massachusetts all the way to the bottom of Argentina, and when the rails finally ran out, this was where they left him. He titled the 1979 book that followed The Old Patagonian Express, after the slow, spindly steam train that carried him into the foothills of the Andes, the railway, as he put it, almost at the end of the world. Argentines knew it by a fonder name. They called it La Trochita, the little gauge, and against every odd it is still running.
The story begins with national ambition and ends in improvisation. In 1908 the Argentine government sketched a grand web of railways across Patagonia, meant to stitch the Andes to the Atlantic ports. Then ministers changed, World War I drained the money and the European engineering, and the dream sputtered out. The line toward Esquel survived only because, after the war, narrow-gauge track and equipment, surplus from the trenches where light railways had moved troops and supplies, were suddenly cheap and plentiful. So Patagonia got a budget railroad: a 750-millimeter gauge so narrow the locals nicknamed it the little one. Belgian coaches arrived in 1922, along with fifty German locomotives from Henschel & Sohn and, later, twenty-five more from Baldwin in Philadelphia.
Building it across the open Patagonian steppe was brutal work. Floods tore out much of the early line in 1931 and 1932, and construction had to begin again. At its peak, a thousand laborers graded the roadbed and laid track through a landscape of wind, dust, and bitter winters, and many of them, having come this far, simply stayed and settled the country they had cut a railroad through. Trains reached El Maitén in 1941, where the maintenance workshops were built, and the first train rolled triumphantly into Esquel on May 25, 1945. For years it carried only freight; passenger service began in 1950, with travelers crowded onto loose wooden benches around a wood stove they used to brew mate and stay warm on the fourteen-hour run.
There is a detail in La Trochita's history that captures its character completely. The train wound so tightly through the Andean foothills, and crawled so slowly, that passengers could step down and walk alongside it on certain stretches, then climb back aboard. This was never a fast or efficient railway, and that was rather the point. As roads and buses improved through the 1960s and 70s, the line slid toward irrelevance, kept alive partly because Patagonia was being discovered by backpackers who treasured exactly its anachronism. Theroux's book gave that timeless quality a name the wider world could love. When the government moved to shut the line in 1992, the outcry was national and even international, and two provincial governments stepped in together to save it.
Today La Trochita endures as a heritage railway, declared a National Historic Monument by Argentina in 1999. Its roster still includes 22 steam locomotives, Henschels and Baldwins of the Mikado type, most dating to 1922, and there is not a single diesel engine anywhere on the line. Tourist trains now run short, scenic routes, Esquel to the hamlet of Nahuel Pan, and El Maitén toward Desvío Thomae, behind locomotives more than a century old. Keeping those ancient machines breathing grows harder every year, as parts and expertise vanish and the workshops sit far from anywhere. The risks are real: a 1922 Henschel derailed on an eroded embankment in November 2023, rolling the vintage wooden cars onto their side with nearly sixty passengers aboard, though astonishingly no one was killed. Still the little train climbs out of Esquel, whistle echoing across the steppe, carrying a bygone age forward one slow mile at a time.
La Trochita runs through the Andean foothills of Chubut and Río Negro provinces; the Esquel terminus and most-traveled tourist section sit near 42.95°S, 71.18°W. From the air the line is a thin thread winding between Esquel, the settlement of Nahuel Pan, and El Maitén, crossing open steppe and curving through low hills, sometimes marked by a telltale plume of black smoke from an oil-fired locomotive. The nearest airport is Esquel (Brigadier Antonio Parodi, ICAO SAVE), beside the southern end of the line. Best viewed at lower altitudes, 4,000 to 7,000 feet, in clear, calm conditions; the eastern, rain-shadow side of the Andes here is frequently sunny, though Patagonian winds can be fierce in the afternoon.