Dear relatives and friends!
We have made a small video about our trip on La Trochita train, which you can see here.
This train is a real museum exhibit. Its cars are made of wood and they will be celebrating their century’s birthday quite soon: they were made in Belgium in 1922. On the move they are creaking and shaking and it feels like they are about to fall apart, but still they keep going. There is a furnace in each car. They say in the past when the train was serving regular passengers (unlike now when it mainly carries tourists), trains used to go so slowly sometimes, that in the cold time of the year passengers were able to walk out on the way and collect fuel for the furnace.
It was the slow speed of the train due to which nobody was seriously injured in 2011, when a very strong wind tore the roof off one car and dropped it between two other cars which caused the whole train to derail and overturn. It was not the single incident of the kind. During the decade in the 50s and 60s the train was derailed twice due to high wind, and once in 1979 – due to a cow standing on the rails. They say, the driver’s last name was Sr. Bovino on that day (which means “Bull’s” in Spanish).
For tourists in Esquel there is a short trip for half a day, the train departs from Esquel and goes to the station called Nahuel Pan for about an hour. There is a community of indigenous people called Mapuche there. Mapuches are much less numerous in Argentina (around 200,000) than in Chile where they amount to almost 9% of the population. The train stays for an hour at the station where you can go to a tiny Mapuche museum, buy souvenirs or food, and then returns to Esquel.
Many people call a trip in La Trochita a trip in a time machine, and indeed it is very easy to move tens of years back in time in your imagination on this train. I don’t know how much longer these locomotives and cars will last, but I suspect that sooner than later they will become the thing of the past which is gone for good.
