Laboratorio Regional de Arquitectura Turns 1.26 Kilometers of Abandoned Rail Edge in Arriaga into a Linear Park

Arriaga has lived beside its railway for more than a century. The town in Chiapas was a strategic node on the Pan-American Railway in the early 1900s, and the tracks still cut straight through its center. For decades the land on either side of that line was leftover space: fenced, unlit, and largely abandoned. With the Mexican government's Interoceanic Railway bringing trains and a new station back to town, Laboratorio Regional de Arquitectura, led by Samuele Xompero and José Luis Contreras, has turned 1.26 kilometers of that edge into a public park of just over 50,000 m², working with landscape architects Sosoki, lighting designers lumbra, and Iyoka.

What interests us here is not any single object but the decision to treat infrastructure as a civic spine instead of a barrier. National rail projects usually arrive in small towns as fences and crossings imposed from above. This one arrives with benches, shade, a skate park, a playground and a station plaza. The design is deliberately modest in its vocabulary, and that restraint is its argument: a long, cheap-to-maintain, well-lit strip can do more for daily life than a signature building.

A Railway Town That Grew Around Its Tracks

From the air, the logic of Arriaga is obvious. The line runs dead straight through a low-rise grid of tiled roofs and tree-lined streets, with green hills closing the horizon. The rail corridor is the longest continuous open space in town, and it sits exactly where everyone has to cross it.

The locomotives still run, which matters. This is not a High Line that turns a dead viaduct into a promenade. The park has to share its edge with active freight and passenger traffic, so safety, crossings and visibility come before any formal gesture.

Reading the Strip from Above

The night aerial explains the project better than any plan could. A lit band runs down the middle of an otherwise dim town grid and turns the former back of the city into its most legible line. By day, the overhead views show a sand-colored ground plane, a strip of planting, ballast and track, all sitting in parallel bands.

Scattered stone blocks and bollards break up that linearity. They are placed loosely enough to read as an informal plaza rather than a corridor, and they cast long shadows that make the ground plane feel inhabited even when empty. It is a simple trick, and it works.

Benches, Poles and Planting as a Kit of Parts

Most of the 1.26 kilometers is built from three repeating elements: low stone or concrete benches, tall black light poles, and beds of yellow- and orange-flowering shrubs. Repetition is the right call for a linear site. It gives the walk a rhythm, keeps costs and maintenance predictable, and lets the special moments along the route stand out.

Lighting deserves credit. The project's stated goal is to make an abandoned rail edge safe, and in a town where the corridor was dark, lumbra's slim, closely spaced poles do the heavy lifting. The dusk shots show people walking and riding past without hesitation, which is the real test.

Shade Comes First

In the Chiapas heat, a bench without shade is a decoration. The design wisely organizes its outdoor rooms around existing mature trees, setting stone tables and benches beneath wide canopies where people will actually sit. Where shade does not yet exist, young trees have been planted, and the round stools and pedestal tables of the smaller squares will improve as those trees grow.

This is landscape thinking from Sosoki that respects what was already there. The strongest spaces in the park are the ones that borrowed their character from a single old tree.

A Freight Car Becomes a Meeting Room

The most memorable move is also the most economical one. An existing freight railcar has been refurbished, painted green and given an orange steel stair and railings, then set back on its tracks as a space for social gatherings. It ties the park to the town's railway history without any nostalgia display, simply by putting an old wagon back to work.

Nearby, a red metal horn form and round discs sit on the paved plaza beneath angled lamp posts. Whether you read them as sculpture or play objects, they give the station area a landmark at street level, which a linear park needs to avoid feeling like one long, undifferentiated walk.

Play, Sport and Movement Along the Line

The program reads as a sequence: family leisure, a playground with timber fixtures, the freight car, the station waiting plaza, a skate park, a parkour area and a multi-purpose court. Black timber blocks set in gravel let children hop between them on the way home from school, and exercise frames with green rungs give teenagers and adults something to climb.

These pieces are not elaborate, and they do not need to be. Spreading activity across the full length keeps every stretch of the corridor occupied at different times of day, which is the most reliable form of security a public space can have.

Why This Project Matters

Mexico is investing heavily in rail, and the towns along those lines will either be cut in half by fences or knitted together by public space. Arriaga Linear Park shows what the second option looks like at the scale of a small town: designed crossings, continuous lighting, durable furniture and planting, delivered as part of the infrastructure package rather than as an afterthought. That model is worth copying.

It is also a reminder that good public space is often a matter of editing, not invention. Laboratorio Regional de Arquitectura kept the trees, reused the railcar, repeated a small set of elements and let the community fill the gaps. The result will be judged less by its photographs than by whether people are still sitting under those trees in ten years. Everything about the design suggests they will be.

Arriaga Linear Park by Laboratorio Regional de Arquitectura (lead architects Samuele Xompero and José Luis Contreras), with Iyoka, landscape architecture by Sosoki and lighting by lumbra. Arriaga, Chiapas, Mexico. 50,881 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Andrés Cedillo and Miguel Cobos.

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