Qualla: Southern Fuegian Railway

Southern Fuegian Railway: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The little steam train puffs out of Ushuaia today carrying tourists in heated carriages, narrating its own legend through the loudspeakers: the southernmost railway on the planet, the Train of the End of the World. The brochures are not wrong. But they leave out who laid the rails. Before it was a heritage attraction, this was the Tren de los Presos, the Train of the Prisoners, and the men who built and ran it were convicts sent to the most remote penal colony Argentina could find.

Read more: Southern Fuegian Railway on Qualla

Southern Fuegian Railway: A Prison at the Bottom of the Map

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ushuaia exists, in large part, because Argentina wanted somewhere to put people it could not keep anywhere else. The first prisoners arrived in 1884, and the settlement grew around the penal colony the way a town grows around a factory. The logic was the same one Britain used for...

Read more: Southern Fuegian Railway on Qualla

Southern Fuegian Railway: Built by the Men It Confined

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By 1909 the governor reported that the wooden line could not keep up, and the railway was rebuilt with Decauville track at a narrow 600-millimeter gauge, worked by steam locomotives. The upgraded line opened in 1910, connecting the prison camp with the forestry camp and running a...

Read more: Southern Fuegian Railway on Qualla

Southern Fuegian Railway: Silence, Then Steam Again

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The penal colony closed in 1947, and a naval base took its place three years later. Without prisoners to work it or wood to haul, the railway fell quiet. Then the earth intervened: the 1949 Tierra del Fuego earthquake tore up much of the line, and for decades the rails lay abando...

Read more: Southern Fuegian Railway on Qualla

Southern Fuegian Railway: The Train of the End of the World

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1994, a seven-kilometer stretch was rebuilt and reborn, this time for visitors, running into Tierra del Fuego National Park. The line now operates as the Ferrocarril Austral Fueguino, and steam locomotives, among them the Argentine-built Ing. L. D. Porta and a pair of articula...

Read more: Southern Fuegian Railway on Qualla