Tsingy Wood Rail on Madagascar is not visited by any tours, but requires "only" hiring a jeep and 24 hour drive on a track so bad that even a jeep repeatedly breaks down. Once you are in tsingy limestone outcrops, it is apparently easy even without any trek. Read Ross Gallardy black comedy report of Budgetbirders. Another one-of-a-kind landscape.
I would say that Ross' Tsingy Wood Rail adventure was not very representative.
It was just one dot on a line / curve of people's experiences having tried to see this bird, and in his case, he was quite unlucky with the vehicle and didn't have good road conditions.
I have seen and photographed Tsingy Wood Rail back in Oct. 2012 and all it took was a sturdy vehicle and some better luck with the road conditions in the dry season. We had (only) 2 stretches of dirt (besides some parts requiring high clearance), and thus had an uneventful ride (hours of driving without seeing anything but agricultural, deforested landscape, save the occasional Malagasy Harrier and a party of Madagascar Sandgrouse on the road).
We were persuaded to do this trip as we skipped Sakalava Rail on purpose at Lac Kinkony a few days earlier, because Lily (our local guide) told us he had an alternative site close to Maintirano (which is only a couple of hours from the Tsingy site). So with this double whammy (Tsingy Wood Rail and Sakalava Rail) in mind, we were willing to go for it.
We first came down from Ankarafantsika (9 hrs drive) and spent the night in Tana as the car had to be repaired the next day (suspension issue).
So starting on day 1 in Tana, we drove 4hrs to Tsiroanomandidi in the afternoon and spend the night there (
Tsiroanomandidi is about the last place with some decent infrastructure where you can stop, eat, spend the night before heading West).
On day 2, we departed early and drove 14 hours to Maintirano, passing by the Tsingy after 11 hours of driving, without giving it a try as it was already late in the day...! In other words: in the right road conditions and with a good vehicle and driver, you can reach the Tsingy area in 15 hours from Tana, but as there isn't any place to sleep, you would need a good car / good driver and camping equipment to increase efficiency of your time.
Our story didn't stop there... on day 3 (without ever seeing the coastline) we left
Maintirano and thought we would have a shot at Sakalava rail on this day, and come back to Maintirano for the night. First we drove North for 1 hour with the 4x4, but to Lily's dismay and surprise, the first (smaller)
river crossing was already too high to cross with the car. So after some arrangements were made, we took a small canoe across, and got onto the back of some offroad motorbikes. We were 5 so it took some time to arrange 5 motorbikes, and while Lily told us it was only a short distance to the Sakalava rail site, we had no clue where exactly it was and totally relied on the (young) drivers. We drove and we drove on dirtroads with our drivers seemingly getting lost from time to time, sometimes we didn't even follow a dirt road and went straight through the bush), only to stop and listen for other motorbikes nearby and trying to catch up...! From time to time, the sand was too loose and we crashed. My leg was almost under the motorbike, and that would not have been a great place to break one. There were a few river crossings on the way,
one of them a fairly big river where the motorbikes had to go in a small and seemingly unstable canoe. After 4 hours on the back of a motorbike, with a backpack + camera I was the first to arrive in
a small village. The local cafe in a little hut had the ghettoblaster at max. volume, and (to my surprise) cold beer...! I lost contact with the others half an hour before arriving, but surprisingly, my travel mates arrived one by one, with red dust on their faces and in dire need for some cold beer!
By that time it was already late in the afternoon, and the rail would have to wait for the next day. We were close to the lake but not just there yet, so we moved onto the
research station closer to the lake. We had no sleeping bag nor mattress but brought a tent, so that night we slept on the ground in a 3-person tent with 5 people..!
The next morning, on day 4, we took a boat on the lake and
duly saw the rail... I remember saying that whenever the Sakalava rail would be gone from Kinkony, world birders would be up to some real adventure trying to reach this lake!
So what about the Tsingy? First, we had to backtrack our way on the motorcycles to Maintirano. The next day (day 5) we left early, reached the Tsingy in the good early morning hours and
duly saw the Rail going off the road some meters into the woods. Our driver, having rested in Maintirano while we were chasing Sakalava rail was in good shape and drove all the way to Tsiraomandidi that day. That's 15 hours of driving time...
On day 6 (having left Tana on day 1) we only had 4 hours of drive (Tsiraomandidi - Tana) left. So we invested 6 days to see 2 birds...!
But as said, the drive itself to the Tsingy rail site wasn't that bad, and in the dry season, it would take 3 days from/to Tana. The Sakalava rail was, at least for us, the real adventure.
I wrote a small trip report about this, photo of the rail included:
Madagascar Trip Report 2012
Regarding government advisories, I am just about to break one that gets apparently broken quite often, considering the reports I am reading (get closer than 50 kms to Yemen in KSA). 
