The 11:00 train from Buenos Aires to San Carlos de Bariloche leaves from Constitucion station on Sunday afternoons. It is operated by Trenes Argentinos, the state rail company, and it is, by some measures, the slowest long-distance passenger train still operating in South America.
The trip is scheduled for twenty-seven hours. It often takes thirty. In April, when this reporter rode it, it took thirty-one hours and forty minutes.
The station at Constitucion is enormous and chaotic. A man sold empanadas from a cooler on the platform. A woman with two small children asked if I could watch her bag while she went to the bathroom. I said yes and she came back with a bottle of orange Fanta and gave it to me as thanks.
The train has three classes: pullman, primera, and turista. I traveled in primera, which is a four-berth compartment with vinyl seats that fold flat at night into bunks. My compartment-mates were Hector, a sixty-year-old electrician from Bahia Blanca; Sol, a twenty-four-year-old veterinary student returning to Bariloche after a semester in the capital; and a man who got off at Olavarria and never told us his name.
We left at 11:08. The first three hours were suburban. Industrial yards, soccer fields full of children in mismatched jerseys, water towers with the names of barrios painted on them in faded white.
By Bahia Blanca, around midnight, the Pampa had taken over. Flat grassland to the horizon. A single tree, then no trees. A windmill, then another windmill, then the absence of windmills for an hour at a time.
Hector explained the train. He has ridden it nineteen times. He used to take it for work. Now he takes it because he likes it.
"The bus is twenty-two hours," he said. "It is faster. But on the bus you cannot walk. On this train you can walk. You can sleep. You can eat."
The eating is done in the dining car, which is two cars back from primera. The menu is short. Milanesa with mashed potatoes. Pasta with red sauce. A dulce de leche flan that arrives in a small metal cup.
“The eating is done in the dining car, which is two cars back from primera.”
I had the milanesa for dinner. It cost the equivalent of four U.S. dollars and was, in the way of all train food, both better and worse than it should have been.
At one in the morning the train stopped at a station called Pringles. It stopped for forty minutes. No one knew why. Hector said this was normal.
"It is the train," he said. "It stops. We do not ask."
The sleeping was difficult. The vinyl seats are vinyl. The train rocks. There is a constant low rumble and an occasional sharp shudder when the brakes are tested. Sol, the veterinary student, slept like a stone. Hector did not appear to sleep at all and yet woke in the morning rested.
Dawn came at Carmen de Patagones, around six-thirty. The landscape had changed. The grass was sparser, browner. The trees, what trees there were, had bent under a wind that had clearly been blowing in the same direction for centuries.
We crossed the Rio Negro on a long, low bridge. The river was wide and green and moving fast. On the south bank we entered Patagonia.
Patagonia, on this train, takes about fourteen hours to cross. The stations are small. Viedma. San Antonio Oeste. Valcheta. Maquinchao. The platforms have one bench and a sign with the name of the town and nothing else.
At Maquinchao, around two in the afternoon on Monday, a woman boarded with a wooden crate containing a live chicken. She got off four stops later at a town called Los Menucos. The chicken, throughout, made no sound.
Hector got off at Jacobacci, which is about three hours from Bariloche. He shook my hand and gave me his phone number and told me to call him if I ever came to Bahia Blanca.
"There is nothing to do there," he said. "But I will show you."
The last stretch into the lake district is the most beautiful. The Pampa lifts into foothills. The foothills become mountains. The first lake, Nahuel Huapi, appears suddenly through a gap in the rocks and the entire train, by silent agreement, looks out the same side.
Sol began to gather her things. She was meeting her mother at the station. She had not seen her in five months.
"I should have flown," she said. "It is two hours. But my mother and I, we always took this train. When I was small. So."
She did not finish the sentence.
We pulled into Bariloche at 6:48 on Monday evening. The station was small. The mountains behind it were enormous and the lake in front of it was the color of a glacier, which is what it was made of.
I stood on the platform for a long time before I left. The train sat behind me, ticking as it cooled. A man with a luggage cart asked if I needed help. I said no, I just wanted to look at it for another minute.
He nodded as if this were a thing people often said, and he wheeled his cart away.
