Don't expect to find a train station at the entrance to the Blue Lagoon or at the foot of the Skógafoss waterfall.
Iceland does not have a railway network, and it is even the only country in Europe (except the principality of Andorra) to have never had one in its history.
The car, bus, plane and ferry remain the only means of traveling around the island of 370,000 inhabitants, whose surface area is comparable to that of Bulgaria and Hungary.
To be more precise, trains have already traveled across the land of fire and ice, but they were never intended to serve as a mode of public transportation.
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The only railways that existed in Iceland were used to move goods and construction workers.
One of them, in operation between 1913 and 1928, enabled the construction of the port of Reykjavík.
The tracks were dismantled during World War II in order to build the capital's airport.
The only vestige of this furtive railway adventure: one of the two vintage locomotives, called Minør, is exhibited outdoors in the port of Reykjavík.
More recently, in the early 2000s, a small railway line was created to enable the construction of the Kárahnjúkar hydroelectric power station, in the east of the island.
Also read: Iceland in summer: temperatures, budget... What you need to know to travel there
A “Lava Express” in the works
However, Iceland has been thinking about creating a passenger rail transport network for more than a century, but none of the projects have come to fruition.
The most recent, called “Lava Express”, consists of connecting Keflavík airport to Reykjavík over around fifty kilometers.
Another project aims to create a tram line in the capital.
But several factors make the train irrelevant in a country like Iceland: small population, intense volcanic activity, geological and climatic constraints... Not to mention the environmental impact that the construction of such infrastructure would represent.
Today, two other European countries, also island countries, have no active train lines: Cyprus and Malta.
But unlike Iceland, these Mediterranean islands have had a railway network in the past.
In Cyprus, under British occupation, a 59 km long mixed freight-passenger line operated between 1905 and 1951. It linked the port of Famagusta to the village of Evrychou via the capital Nicosia.
Since 2004, the old station in the village of Evrychou has hosted the Cyprus Railway Museum.
Malta, for its part, had an 11 km line which connected the current capital Valletta to the former capital L-Imdina.
Inaugurated in 1883, it reduced the travel time between the two cities from three hours to thirty minutes.
The bankruptcy of the line led to its closure in 1931. A museum, the Malta Railway Foundation, located in the old Birchircha station, traces the history of this one and only Maltese railway line.
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