Disappointment on the Old Patagonian Express

 

Thirty years ago, the US academic and travel writer Paul Theroux ended an epic journey through the Americas with a steam train ride into the Argentine Patagonian town of Esquel.

Grumpy, self-centred and more than slightly barmy, Theroux had travelled from the cold of the north-eastern US to the emptiness of Patagonian steppe. Apart from a decision to bypass Nicaragua, then a troubled country in the grip of internal conflict, the writer made his journey more or less entirely by train.

To repeat such a journey today would be a laughable, pointless endeavour. Quite apart from the parlous state of railways in the US, the South American rail network today exists more in name than in reality. Across Argentina’s empty south deserted railway stations have been turned into museums in an effort to keep alive some of the history that once coursed through their town centres.

In the port town of Puerto Deseado on the Atlantic coast, tracks outside the railway station are home to a decrepit old engine and a clutch of lonely men staring out at the sea.

Inside the proud station building relics of a bygone age are on show, hinting at the vitality and the trade the Patagonian railway once brought to far-away places like Puerto Deseado. Further towards the beaten track the towns of Trelew, north of Puerto Deseado, and Puerto Madryn, another hour up the coast, commemorate their railways in similar fashion; in Trelew the tiny old station combines a railway museum with a potted history of the settlement of the region; in Madryn the station is now just a relic stuck in the entrance to the town’s long-distance bus terminal.

In Esquel, though, we thought steam still lived on. From Esquel the narrow-gauge railway used by Theroux still rumbles along a portion of the originial 408km stretch of track. According to all the information we could get – including a well-appointed website for the Viejo Expreso Patagonico, as the train is known in Spanish – travel was possible from Esquel to the town of El Maiten, once the engineering and maintenance hub for the line.

Except it isn’t. In Esquel, bemused staff at the town’s rickety little railway station broke the bad news. All we could do was buy tickets for a tiny stretch of the line to the nowhere of Nahuel Pan, a tiny settlement of the indigneous Mapuche people just 19km away. A round-trip to Nahuel Pan on the train, along with tour guide and a couple of hundred Argentine railway nostalgics, would cost us about £8 each.

Travel to El Maiten was impossible, we were consistently told. La Trochita, as the service is affectionately known, is now essentially a nostalgia operation rather than a railway that goes anywhere and does anything useful. It makes the journey to El Maiten just once a year, we were told, for the annual festival of steam. Except this year it wouldn’t go, they said. Money was tight and it wouldn’t be possible to make the trip. Thirty years after the railway was made famous, the once-a-year service was being delayed, possibly indefinitely.

We signed up, more out of obligation than anything else. After all, we had travelled across Patagonia to be ride the Old Patagonian Express. The engine hooted obligingly as it chuntered out of Esquel. The wooden carriages croaked and groaned as the they were hauled through the soft green hillsides around the town. Well-dressed Argentines – many of whom had already ridden the train several times before and had come back for more – took pictures and poked around the ethnic tat for sale when the train stopped.

Nahuel Pan itself was a dispiriting place where little of the fierce spirit of the region’s Mapuche people lived on with any vigour.
Then, after the engine turned a trick by pootling off into the distance only to return pointing in the right direction for the return leg, we all climbed back on board and headed back to Esquel.

“I love it here, this is my fifth time on the train,” said one woman, holidaying in Esquel from Buenos Aires. “We don’t have trains in Argentina anymore, so this is all so different for us.” She beamed contentedly; she and many others on board saw nothing odd in taking a 19km train ride to nowhere before getting straight back on and heading home.

There was widespread outcry when the unprofitable La Trochita faced the axe after Argentina’s railways were privatised in the 1990s. The line was saved for the future. Online and in travel guidebooks now trumpet the fact that you can actually get somewhere on this “working” steam train, and there is much speculation that sections of the line will be restored and the Old Patagonian Express will ride again.

In Esquel, still the end of the line, but now also its beginning, that doesn’t seem quite so likely.

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