The Pelion railway is sometimes called the De Chirico train, and the nickname carries a whole family story. Evaristo de Chirico designed the line, supervising its construction in stages between 1894 and 1903. Working alongside the project was his young son Giorgio, born in Volos, who absorbed the sight of locomotives moving through the mountain landscape. Decades later, having helped invent Metaphysical painting and inspired the Surrealists, Giorgio de Chirico kept returning to the image of a small train, often tucked into the background of an otherwise still and dreamlike scene. Few railways anywhere can claim to have shaped the visual imagination of a great artist. This one runs straight through it.

The line began as an ambition of the Thessaly Railways company. Having completed its metre-gauge routes from Volos to Larissa in 1884 and onward to Kalampaka in 1886, the company looked east toward the communities of the Pelion peninsula. But the terrain was unforgiving and the space tight, so engineers chose a narrow gauge that could thread the mountainside. The railway crept outward from Volos, reaching Agria in 1892, Ano Lechonia in 1896, and finally Mileai, or Milies, in 1903. The lower stretch near Volos ran essentially as a tramway through the city. It was only above Ano Lechonia that the line revealed its real character, climbing into terrain where ordinary railway building gave way to something closer to mountaineering in iron and stone.

The mountain section from Ano Lechonia to Mileai is the engineering heart of the railway. Across this stretch the builders threw seven stone bridges, bored two tunnels, and carried five stone road bridges over the line, finishing at Milies with a graceful iron bridge. Engine sheds rose at Volos, Agria, and Mileai, and water towers stood ready to slake the steam locomotives along the climb. To ride it is to feel the engineering in your body: the slow grade, the curves hugging the contours, the lush Pelion greenery sliding past the windows. This was never a railway built for speed. It was built to reach places that a faster line never could.

The railway's fortunes followed Greece's. Thessaly Railways ran it as a private line until 1955, then the state took over, and in 1971 it passed to the Hellenic Railways Organisation, which promptly suspended service to save money. For a time the train seemed finished. But affection for it ran deep. The Friends of Pelion Railway revived a lower stretch as a heritage line from 1987 to 1994, and in 1996 the upper section from Ano Lechonia to Mileai reopened, first with steam, then with diesel from 1999. Stations at Ano Lechonia and Agria, battered by earthquakes, were rebuilt to their original designs. Today the little train runs on weekends and holidays from spring into autumn, daily through July and August, carrying passengers up the same slopes a boy once watched his father conquer.