About this journey

Uyuni station sits at the heart of a town whose identity was shaped by the arrival of the first railway into Bolivia from Chile on 20 November 1890. That line was driven by the silver trade: the Antofagasta–Uyuni section, stretching 612 km, was completed in 1889 at a cost of £2.2 million and built by the Antofagasta (Chili) Bolivia Railway Co. Ltd., organised in London in 1888. President Aniceto Arce had championed the project, convinced that a reliable transport network would open the country's mining wealth to Pacific export — though construction was repeatedly interrupted by Aymara communities who opposed it.

The line southeast toward Atocha came later. The Uyuni–Atocha section, 90 km in length, was built in 1913 as part of a phase connecting Bolivia's western mining regions, and was subsequently extended further to Villazón between 1915 and 1925 to reach the Argentine border. Bolivia's railways were eventually nationalised under ENFE, created in 1964, which consolidated the inherited network. The FCA FERROSTAAL locomotive #337 covers this same corridor today, arriving at Atocha — a station that once marked the frontier of an expanding rail network and remains a junction point on a route whose origins lie firmly in the mineral wealth of the Bolivian altiplano.