For a country of jagged mountains, sweltering swamps and jungles, and very little in between, Bolivia is criss-crossed by a surprising number of train tracks. They cut through the lowlands and are lie coiled up over the highlands; they loop through every major city and many tiny towns; they are everywhere, but they are almost all in a state of disuse.

 This is the sad truth of Bolivian railways. The maps in Lonely Planet Bolivia are sutured with dotted train lines, and punctuated by the sad refrain ‘Former Train Station’. La Paz has a train station but no train services. Cochabamba has a train station but no train services. Sucre and Potosi have train stations and were almost but are currently not linked by a train service. For now the only train in Sucre is disappearing into the long grass behind the station. In the yards around it chickens are raised, and the guard dog cavorts with her puppy.

There was a time when train travel was the only way to get about in Bolivia. There were virtually no highways, and two networks – one in the highlands and one in the lowlands – sprawled across the country, carrying most of the country’s people, visitors and freight. La Paz was linked with Peru, Chile and Argentina; Santa Cruz – at the time little more than an agricultural backwater unable to imagine that it would one day become Bolivia’s biggest city – was connected to Brazil.

One of the causes behind the war that cost Bolivia its coastline was its taxing of the railway line between the mountains and the coast. Once Chile had taken the coast, leaving Bolivia landlocked, it offered a compensation of sorts in the form of rail connections between Bolivia and the Pacific, allowing Bolivia to export is mineral wealth. The connection still exists today, but is nothing more than a pair of rails over which the occasional freight train runs. There is no passenger service, and the tiny stations and stops along the way are derelict.

Trains-as-compensation are a recurring theme of Bolivian history. When Brazil annexed most of Bolivia’s rubber-rich jungles (and proceeded to ruthlessly deforest these), it offered a train line as compensation that could eventually link Bolivia with the Atlantic. This was to be the third attempt to connect Bolivia’s north with Brazilian lines, but the tracks never reached Bolivian soil.

The latter half of the twentieth century saw the gradual dismantling of the Bolivian rail system. In 1964 Bolivia had about 100 train engines and 3000 kilometres of road. By the turn of the millennium it had 50 engines and 40,000 kilometres of road. As the road networks expanded the two rail networks, which have never been connected, fell out of popularity. In the 70s and 80s Bolivia’s economic situation saw railways and other public services starved of funding and rapidly deteriorating. In the early 90s a study found that $40 billion would be needed to completely upgrade the rail system. Needless to say this money did not and does not exist. In the mid 90s at the urging of the World Bank most of Bolivia’s industries were privatised, including the rail system. The aging system was not profitable and passenger services were soon discontinued, leaving only a limited freight system.

Today there are a few passenger services in Bolivia. The so-called ‘Death Train’ (what is it about Bolivia and such epithets?) runs passengers, cargo and contraband from Santa Cruz to the Brazilian border, a vital link for the city’s economy. Another more touristed line runs from Oruro to Uyuni to Tupiza to the Argentine border. It still retains some of the faded grandeur of the old rail services, in the uniforms of the conductors and the rattling place settings in the dining car. The rails and cars though have seen better days; when I trained from Uyuni to Oruro there was a seven hour delay because the train in front of ours had de-railed.

There are no real prospects for the revival of Bolivia’s rail network. Buses, vans and trucks – both official and unofficial – are the transportation of choice, and the lonely rails embedded across the country are slowly disappearing. In 2007 thieves stole 100 metres of track; this is perhaps one of the few remaining uses for the tracks, unless huge amounts of money miraculously appear to rehabilitate the system.

One of the main tourist attractions in Uyuni is the train cemetery, where long links of rusting locomotives slowly crumple and collapse into the desert. They serve as a sad reminder of another of Bolivia’s lost institutions, another lost opportunity to progress.