Twenty-one passengers a day

Thenmala’s operator tells visitors they need a minimum of two days to see everything it has built. Thenmala’s railway station handled 7,527 passengers in the financial year 2022–23. That is twenty-one people a day, on two platforms, earning about ₹1,246 daily.

The station is a kilometre from the town, on a line through the Ghats that people travel from other states to photograph. Essentially nobody uses it to come here. There are three reasons, and each one is more interesting than a timetable.

Reason one: it is called something else

Every signpost in the town says Thenmala. Indian Railways calls the station Tenmalai, station code TML. The yellow nameboard on the platform building, photographed in June 2026, reads TENMALAI in Latin script, with Malayalam and Hindi renderings beside it that match neither the Latin spelling nor each other.

Wikidata records the station as Tenmala, with Thenmala only as an alias. So a visitor who searches a booking app for a train to Thenmala — the name on the tourism website, the district website, the road signs and the entrance gate — may well conclude there is no station at all.

It is a small thing and it is decisive. A destination that cannot be found in the booking flow does not get arrivals.

Reason two: it answers to Madurai

Thenmala sits on the Kollam–Sengottai branch, and the station is administered from the Madurai railway division of Southern Railway. A Kerala forest village’s railway is run from Tamil Nadu, across the ghat, which is exactly the sort of administrative seam that leaves a small station near the bottom of everybody’s priority list.

What that division gets in exchange is one of the great pieces of railway engineering in the south. The ghat section carries four tunnels named for Tenmala, plus the Urukkunnu and Aryankavu tunnels, and the thirteen-arch bridge — Pathimoonnu Kannara Palam — about 2.4 km east of the village at Kazhuthurutty, thirteen granite piers carrying the line across a valley. It is over a century old and it is the reason enthusiasts ride this route at all.

Reason three: for seven and a half years there were no trains

The line is old. The survey began in 1888 and finished in 1899; construction ran from 1900 to 1902; the first goods train ran in 1902. Metre-gauge passenger service from Kollam was inaugurated on 1 July 1904, the first train flagged off by Maharajah Moolam Thirunal of Travancore with a twenty-one-gun salute, and the Punalur–Sengottai section that Thenmala stands on opened on 26 November 1904.

Then came the conversion to broad gauge, and it took the better part of two decades. Work started in 1998. Kollam–Punalur metre-gauge services were withdrawn on 1 May 2007 and the broad-gauge line reopened there on 10 May 2010. Punalur–Sengottai services were withdrawn in September 2010 — and did not return until the reopening special ran on 31 March 2018. Conversion had been completed the previous December.

Seven and a half years with no train through Thenmala.

The dates that make it a story

Now line the two timelines up, because they are almost comically synchronised.

Thenmala’s ecotourism project was mooted seriously in 1996. The society was registered on 15 July 1998 — the same year the gauge conversion began. The destination was inaugurated in 2001. And for the whole of its first two decades of existence, the railway that served it was either about to close, closing, or closed.

India’s self-declared first planned ecotourism destination was planned, opened and grown up in a period when nobody could get a train to it. Every habit of arrival that formed here formed around a car or a bus. When the line finally reopened in 2018, the habit had been set for a generation, and the station reopened to twenty-one passengers a day.

There is a general lesson buried in it about the difference between having infrastructure and having a service, and about how quickly the second is forgotten once it stops. But the specific version is enough: an ecotourism project that would love visitors to arrive by rail spent its formative years with its railway switched off.

What this means if you are coming

Do not plan on the train, and do plan on the road. The realistic rail approach is Kollam Junction, 69 km away, or Punalur, and then a bus or taxi. KSRTC and private services on the Kollam–Shencottah and Trivandrum–Shencottah routes stop at Thenmala; the district administration puts the town 66 km east of Kollam.

If you do get a train, you have done something almost nobody does, and you will step off about a kilometre from the town — the district administration’s figure, against the Irrigation Department’s two kilometres from the dam — and can walk to the ecotourism gate. Check the timetable under Tenmalai, not Thenmala. And look at the nameboard while you are there: it is the whole problem, in yellow and black, at eye level.