Uyuni Train Cemetery

On the flat, dusty edge of the Bolivian altiplano, just outside the town of Uyuni, rows of dead locomotives stand in the open as if a railway had been abandoned mid-shift. This is the Cementerio de Trenes, the train graveyard: around a hundred steam engines and wagons, the oldest from the late nineteenth century, rusting in the thin, dry air at the rim of the Salar de Uyuni. It is often described as the largest collection of its kind in the world.

Uyuni grew up around the railway. From the late nineteenth century British-backed companies built the line that became the Ferrocarril de Antofagasta a Bolivia, carrying ore and salts from the mines of the interior down to the Pacific ports, and British engineers settled in the town while the track was laid. Uyuni became a junction and a depot where locomotives were serviced. When mining collapsed around the 1940s, many of the engines and wagons were no longer needed and were simply shunted onto sidings outside town and left there.

The desert has preserved them unevenly. Corrosion is slow in this climate, but salt blows in from the flats, metal scavengers have stripped parts, and much of the rolling stock is covered with graffiti. That mixture is exactly what photographers come for: orange boilers and wheel sets against a hard blue sky, the horizon empty in every direction, the silhouettes of old chimneys and cabs at sunset. For most visitors it is the prelude to the salt flat itself, the industrial overture before the white emptiness. A smaller and better-kept group of American locomotives stands in the mining settlement of Pulacayo, about 16 km away, including an engine that local history links to a 1908 train robbery by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Getting there

The graveyard lies about 3 km southwest of Uyuni, along the old tracks that lead out of town; Potosí, the nearest large city, is about 150 km away. Joya Andina International Airport (UYU) at Uyuni is about 5 km away. Tours of the Salar de Uyuni leaving from Uyuni often include a stop here, and it is also reachable by taxi or on foot from the town.