Take a rail journey, on the world's narrowest-gauge tracks, which commences in the world's southern-most city; threads its way through spectacular, national park scenery, amid blinding, white, horizontal, end-of-the-world-characteristic snow; and traces its history to a penitentiary, which had been purposefully built just to populate the area, and you have a travel experience of fascinating proportions.

The A-framed, wooden logged, alpine-resembling terminal building at the Estacion del Fin del Mundo, with its corrugated iron roof, had been located in the Municipal Camping Ground of Tierra del Fuego National Park in Argentina eight kilometers from Ushuaia, current capitol of Argentine Patagonia, which had been comprised of the Neuquen, Rio Negro, Chubut, and Tierra del Fuego provinces. The very narrow End of the World Train, consisting of the tiny steam locomotive in the front and its eight wooden, green-painted, boxy-like passenger coaches behind, had been cradled by the slender, almost toy-like track behind glass doors leading from the terminal lobby to the platform which uniformed conductors opened 15 minutes before its scheduled 1255 departure, punching tickets and emitting the throngs of passengers.

The End of the World Train itself arose out of the dual-parameter need to populate the then-inhospitable island of Tierra del Fuego, located at the southern tip of South America, and to establish a penitentiary to which the country's criminals could be sent. On October 12, 1884, the Tierra del Fuego government had been founded, along with Ushuaia, the world's southern-most city, which is located 3,000 kilometers south of Buenos Aires and 4,000 kilometers north of the earth's southern pole.

The train, initially running on wooden rails, itself served two purposesnamely, to carry materials to the construction site of the military prison, which had been completed in 1902, and to transport prisoners and workers between the newly formed city and the facility. The rails, replaced by steel in 1910, facilitated the permanent service which commenced the following year and rapidly earned the reputation of the "Convict Train."

Four German steam locomotives provided initial power: a 0-4-0 manufactured by Orenstein and Koppel in Berlin; two 20-horsepower, 1910 0-6-0Ts, also built by Orenstein and Koppel; and a 1928 0-8-0T Arn. Jung.

Prisoners would typically depart on the Convict Train before dawn, sitting on its flatbed cars with their feet

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