Nushki Railway Station

Quiet country station on the long-distance line from Quetta toward the Iranian border

A small, dusty railway station on the line that runs west from Quetta to the Iranian border at Taftan, Nushki's station is a working piece of late-imperial infrastructure that has changed remarkably little in a century. The platform is single, the buildings low and whitewashed, and the timetable thin: a passenger service of a few trains a week, occasional freight, and the long-distance "Quetta–Zahedan" international train that crawls across the desert toward Iran.

The station building is more atmospheric than busy. Sit on the platform with a cup of chai and you will see the rhythm of border-country travel: traders with bundles, families with metal trunks, the railway police doing their slow rounds.

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A story
Nushki sits on the historic 'Nushki Extension Railway', built by the British in 1905 as part of an ambitious strategy to project influence into Iran during the Great Game. The line was extended all the way to the Iranian frontier at Mirjawa in 1917, when the British feared Ottoman and German agitation in Persia. It is now one of the loneliest passenger rail routes in Asia.

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