The narrow-gauge line that now carries tourists west from Ushuaia was built by prisoners hauling firewood. Argentina's southern penal colony, operating from 1902, needed timber; convicts felled lenga beech in the Pipo valley and pushed hand-carts along a 600 mm track. Steam locomotives replaced muscle in the 1910s. The prison closed in 1947, the railway fell silent, and an earthquake finished the roadbed in 1949. The reconstruction came much later. In 1994 a private operator relaid seven kilometres of track as the Southern Fuegian Railway, and the end of the world train & tierra del fuego national park became a single itinerary rather than two separate errands. The route runs from Estación Fin del Mundo through the Cañadón del Toro to Estación Parque, crossing the Pipo River on a rebuilt bridge and passing the Cemetery of Trees — a plain of pale stumps left by the convict work gangs, still standing after a century. The park itself was created in 1960, the first in Argentina to protect a coastline. Its 68,900 hectares run from the Chilean border to the Beagle Channel, covering peat bogs, glacial lakes and subantarctic forest of lenga, ñire and guindo. Roble de Tierra del Fuego shelters Andean condors, austral parakeets and introduced Canadian beavers whose dams have reshaped whole valleys. Lago Roca straddles the frontier. Lapataia Bay marks the terminus of National Route 3, 3,079 kilometres from Buenos Aires, where a wooden sign records the fact and visitors stop simply because the road does. That combination explains why guided tours from Ushuaia and the historic railway ride are so often sold together. One is industrial archaeology, the other is protected wilderness, and both sit on the same twelve-kilometre stretch of Route 3 west of town. The Fuegian landscape here is young in human terms: the Yámana people fished these channels for six thousand years before European settlement, and shell middens along Ensenada Zaratiegui still mark their camps. The mission at Ushuaia, the prison, the railway and the park form a sequence of uses laid over one another. Today the site draws visitors for its geography as much as its history. Cormorants work the shoreline. The Andes end here, in low wet mountains that slide into the sea. Any end of the world train & tierra del fuego national park tour covers ground that was, within living memory, a labour camp — a fact the peat and the beech have almost, but not entirely, absorbed.