The Ramal Talca–Constitución

At González Bastías, forty-four kilometres out of Talca, the railway's two trains have always met. The station sits at the exact midpoint of the eighty-eight-kilometre branch down to the coast, and the timetable was built around it: one railcar out of each end, a crossing on the gravel platform, then on to Talca and to Constitución. Since a winter storm brought trees and hillside down on the lower half of the line in July 2026, that crossing has become the end of the journey. The railcar from Talca runs as far as González Bastías and goes back the way it came.

What still runs is metre gauge, rural, and unlike anything else left in Chile. The Ramal Talca–Constitución is the country's last branch line and its last narrow-gauge passenger railway, laid along the north bank of the Maule from 1889 and finished twenty-six years and seven presidencies later, in December 1915. Track, stations and halts were declared a national monument in 2007, which is why the rails cannot simply be lifted. The villages strung along it are still easier to reach by train than by road. The vehicle is a buscarril — literally a bus-rail: a German Ferrostaal railcar of 1961, a bus body on railway wheels, now being replaced by three Brazilian-built units that arrived in 2025.

The railcar leaves from Talca's main station, the same platforms the Santiago–Chillán expresses use, and for the first minutes it runs under the wires of the main line before the metre-gauge rails peel away west and the catenary stops. From there the branch has the valley to itself. It follows the north bank of the Maule for its whole length, on a formation that was never straightened and never doubled, through country where the river is the reason for everything: the vines, the willows, the sandbanks, the places people live.

Colín comes up at kilometre 12, where the line crosses the Claro on the first of its metal bridges. Corinto is at 27 — the station was called Pocoa until a Greek miller who had settled there decided the country looked like the Corinth he came from, and the village church dates from 1794. Curtiduría at 34 takes its name from a tannery that worked there between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth; it was the end of the line when the first section opened on 13 August 1892, and it is now better known for rosé grapes and adobe wine cellars. Between them the train stops at Unihue, La Palma, Los Llocos and El Peumo, four of the seven halts that EFE agreed to keep serving after negotiations with the communities along the branch.

González Bastías, and why the train turns there

The station at kilometre 44 was called Infiernillo — little hell — until 1956, when it was renamed for the poet Jorge González Bastías, who lived there. It is the branch's crossing station: the single track has a loop, and the two railcars working the line meet on it. That is what put the whole timetable where it is, and it is why the village has a hand-worked turntable, a station restaurant and a reputation for tortillas de rescoldo, the flat bread baked in the embers.

Beyond it, at present, nothing runs. The line goes on to Toconey at 48, Pichamán at 52, Forel at 62 — named after the Swiss biologist François-Alphonse Forel, and standing five hundred metres east of the Quebrada Honda tunnel — then Huinganes at 66, Maquehua at 74, whose station burned in the forest fires of 2017, and finally over the Banco de Arena bridge into Constitución at 88. The operator's own journey planner has answered servicio temporalmente suspendido for every one of those stations on every date it will sell, which for a railway that is the only public transport some of these villages have is a serious thing rather than an inconvenience.

The buscarril

The vehicles that give the line its nickname are Ferrostaal SB-56 railcars, German, built in 1961: a power car and a trailer, twenty-five and a half metres over the pair, thirty tonnes, a 180 horsepower diesel, eighty seats and a single lavatory. They are numbered in the ADM series — 253, 255 and 256 are the ones photographers keep finding — and they wear two liveries, an older teal and yellow and a later orange and green. Sixty-five years of service is not a boast anyone makes of them; it is why they are being replaced.

The replacements are three two-car diesel units from Marcopolo Rail of Brazil, ordered under a US$15 million contract, delivered in 2025 and put through dynamic trials from October of that year. One of them reached Constitución on 11 December 2025, which EFE described as the first new train to arrive there in sixty years. Commercial running began on 3 March 2026 with a mixed fleet, the new unit taking two of the four daily frequencies. They carry 223 — eighty seated, the rest standing — with air conditioning, USB sockets and an accessible lavatory, and they have a cab at each end, so they no longer have to run to a turntable to change direction.

Two trains run in each direction, every day except Tuesdays and Fridays. The whole run is forty-four kilometres and takes an hour and eighteen minutes; EFE's own journey planner labels the traction Buscarril.

The times below are the operator's, read from EFE's journey planner in August 2026 and checked across fourteen consecutive dates and again in late November. On Tuesdays and Fridays the planner returns no service at all.

Talca to González Bastías

González Bastías to Talca

The morning pair makes a day return possible in one direction only: out at 07:15 and back at 08:45 leaves twelve minutes at González Bastías, while the 16:20 out and the 08:45 back the next morning is an overnight. From the village end it works the other way round — 08:45 up to Talca and 16:20 back gives six hours in the city.

Two things the published times do not say

EFE's service page for the branch carries two different timetables, one of them stale: an older block with a 07:05 departure from Talca and no stops at Unihue, La Palma or Los Llocos, and a current block matching the planner. Where they disagree at González Bastías, by eight minutes, the planner is the version the operator's own booking system uses.

The four daily frequencies that ran the full length to Constitución until July 2026 are not suspended in part. Every station beyond González Bastías is closed to passengers, and the planner returns servicio temporalmente suspendido for all of them, on every date it will sell. No restoration date has been published.

Departures are published by the operator: EFE · Tren Talca – Constitución (opens in a new tab).

The branch has one of the simplest fare tables on the Chilean network and one of the cheapest. EFE's own calculator returns the same figure for Talca to Colín, Corinto, Curtiduría or González Bastías — CLP 1,380 for a general passenger, whether the journey is twelve kilometres or forty-four. Residents of the villages pay CLP 920, and residents who are pensioners or students CLP 460. There is no first class and nothing to reserve.

The Talca office sells for cash and the on-board staff sell too. The online quota is deliberately small, because residents have priority — and tried in August 2026 it returned no availability at all, which leaves the ticket office and the train itself as the reliable ways to travel. Luggage is the point on this line: checked items are CLP 500 each, and residents selling what they grow get their first free.

No rail pass covers this journey, and none would be worth carrying if it did. Chile sits outside the Interrail and Eurail schemes, EFE sells each of its named services separately, and the fare from Talca to the far end of the branch is CLP 1,380. A pass has nothing here to discount.

What does connect is the long-distance train. Talca is one of the stops on EFE Central's Estación Central–Chillán service, which left Santiago four times on the day this was checked in August 2026, and the branch starts from the same station. That ticket is bought separately, from EFE Central (opens in a new tab), and the branch fare is paid at the Talca window or on board.

Four stops carry the journey as it runs today, and none of them is a resort. The branch was built to serve farms and villages, and what there is to see at each station is what the valley does for a living — grapes, adobe cellars, a country church, a poet's house. The stations themselves are part of the national monument declared in 2007, which is why several of them still look the way they did when the line was young.

Both ends of the day are in Talca. The morning railcar leaves at 07:15 and the evening one gets back at 19:08, so a bed in the city covers the journey in either direction, and Talca is also where the long-distance train from Santiago sets its passengers down.

Along the branch itself the accommodation is domestic rather than commercial. The Asociación Gremial El Ramal, which represents the small businesses strung along the line, lists a cabin at Curtiduría and two options at González Bastías — a historic house and a vineyard — all of them booked by telephone, two or three days ahead, and none with a website of its own. Nothing about them can be verified here beyond the association's own listing, so they get a mention rather than a card.