Begun in 1994, the train runs several trips daily, fewer in wintertime, from a station a few miles west of Ushuaia, population 45,000. A former penitentiary as infamous to Argentines as Alcatraz, El Presidio operated from the early 1900s until 1947, when it was closed for humanitarian reasons. Now it is a museum on the grounds of a naval base. Chopping firewood from these beech forests is still a year-round task for many in Tierra del Fuego, where winter yields only six to eight hours of daily sunlight and the temperature hovers around freezing. The tiny train chugs past an ice-encrusted stream, frozen peat bogs and jagged mountaintops rendered postcard perfect by a recent snowfall.
Icicles drip from the rocks.
This was once a forest where the convicts cut down trees. Sparks from the old freight train started fires here. The train halts beside a replica of an Indian settlement, then rolls past an old sawmill and fields of wild berry bushes now dormant in the snow as the smokestack's plume rises in the pale winter light. Further along, the wagons wend through the Cemetery of the Trees, hundreds upon hundreds of acres of trees removed by convicts. As you can see, the prisoners cut down many, many trees.