The longest train journey is epic – but nobody's ever taken it

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/portugal-to-singapore-train/

by PaulHoule • 1 year ago

103 43 1 year ago

bigthink.com

ChrisMarshallNY2• 1 year ago

I used to travel to Tokyo from New York, regularly.

I would get on the Long Island Railroad, in Huntington, and get off the Narita Express, in Shinagawa.

Strangely enough, I would get off the train, before I got on the train.

cyberpunk• 1 year ago

What?

ChrisMarshallNY2• 1 year ago

It was a joke.

It wasn’t trains, the whole way. I took the LIRR to JFK Airport, and the Narita Express, from Narita Airport (13-hour flight, in between).

There’s a big timezone jump. You go back, 24 hours, then forward ten or eleven hours, so your watch tells you that you are arriving before you left (but you are still dog-tired).

If you are being precise, your watch might tell you that the whole trip actually took a couple of hours.

Once they started doing direct to Haneda, then you really did arrive “before” you left.

hulium• 1 year ago

Before 2022, I once noticed that the Deutsche Bahn app for German trains let me put Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, as destination. The app is good at finding international connections, but it only shows stations that are actually reachable from Germany. After some research, I found it was indeed possible to find a connection from Europe to Pyongyang via Vladivostok once per month. Not anymore though, they removed the Russian train network from their system.

canjobear• 1 year ago

There’s a blog post series from a guy who did this.

https://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-everything...

jonah• 1 year ago

I read this blog back in the day. Fascinating saga.

stop_nazi2• 1 year ago

This opportunity was available before the covid. Now Poland has closed the railway connection with Belarus

netsharc3• 1 year ago

Deutsche Bahn lets you enter stations outside of Germany, e.g. here Liverpool Lime Street to London St. Pancras: https://www.bahn.de/buchung/fahrplan/suche#sts=true&so=Liver...

Tarsul• 1 year ago

Problem with their website is that it appears that your journey is possible only to then be disappointed at the last step of the check-out. Happens way too often and especially for international travel.

Btw. I nearly traveled from Budapest to Hamburg in a single train but alas as written above I had to put in a stop in Munich just so that I could finish my order (both routes were roughly 14hours which I found quite manageable).

russellcoleman2• 1 year ago

After all, the definition of the longest possible train journey is “the shortest possible route between the two farthest possible stations.”

I’m trying to think, what would be the most efficient way to compute this? There has to be something better than brute force

russellcoleman2• 1 year ago

Oh I think this is just finding the graph diameter

jvanderbot2• 1 year ago

Longest shortest path. Checks out.

input_sh2• 1 year ago

I think it's a pretty stupid question to begin with as it ignores visas. Also, too many different gauge widths means far too many train changes to be considered a part of the same journey.

If your definition includes a visa-free journey with no need to change trains, then the theretical limit is pretty easy to figure out: Minsk - Vladivostok. The second longest theoretical journey would probably be northern British Colombia down to Mexico / Guatemala border.

coldtea3• 1 year ago

I think it's a pretty stupid question to begin with as it ignores visas.

Why should it take them into account? 99% of the time they're a trivial matter.

rkagerer• 1 year ago

I'd like to dream one day in a future generations away from now you'll be able to go all the way from one end to the other, without political barriers interrupting your epic tour of this huge swath of our planet. Maybe we'll even bridge Gibraltar so you can continue on through Africa as well.

Theodores• 1 year ago

We have gone backwards in this regard, there was a time when you could get the train from the UK to Egypt or even to Iraq, with railway posters advertising such services.

Check out retours.eu for some classy posters from a time when railways ruled along with ocean liners. You really could get to places that we have subsequently deemed to be too war-torn for travel. Even in America you had 'broadway' tracks (four tracks, for slow and fast services in each direction) racing across the country, with competing operators, each with their own 'broadway' tracks.

Interestingly, in the UK, train services have not got quicker, necessarily. There were also the Beeching cuts that decimated the amount of services.

inglor_cz2• 1 year ago

Ease of traveling is indirectly correlated with political diversity.

If one power (the Mongols, the Romans, the Inca, the Russians, the Chinese, the British) undisputedly controls some territory, it is easier to travel across it than when there are two, three ... twenty smaller powers along the way.

stop_nazi2• 1 year ago

Now there is no railroad connection between Belarus and Poland. Shame!

posnet• 1 year ago

I did this route (sans the new Laos line, which was a bus at the time) in 2014. The world really was a different place.

Shout out to 'The man in seat 61', couldn't have done it without it.

https://www.seat61.com/

mocamoca• 1 year ago

Amazing! What was your budget? For how long?

reustle• 1 year ago

I finished it in 2019~, same with skipping the Laos section that didn’t exist. I contributed a bit to Seat61 from rural local stations in Myanmar while it was still open.

https://reustle.org/rtw shows my map around the entire planet. Next time by moto!

mncharity• 1 year ago

Fwiw, https://meetup.tokyotech.com/ on https://reustle.org/ doesn't resolve. I've daydreamed "I arrive in X. Museums? Meetups!"

breakingcups• 1 year ago

Tangentially related, I spotted a show on Nebula yesterday about two men going on a train journey from the arctic to Africa called Downie Express.

notwhereyouare• 1 year ago

also available on youtube. same channel

jxjnskkzxxhx• 1 year ago

The idea that nobody has ever taken this journey makes the author sound provincial - who's with me?

bravoetch• 1 year ago

It's both a clickbait title and probably true. If the title was 'no evidence for human completion of longest possible contiguous rail journey' would you still think them provincial? Would you still click?

netsharc3• 1 year ago

Somehow I highly doubt there's a train that goes all the way from Portugal to Laos without needing to transfer, the first few paragraphs uses words to suggest such a train trip exists.

It's possible to stay on one train from Vladivostok to Moscow, on the train ride number 001Э (002Э goes the opposite direction): https://www.russianrail.com/train/rossiya

And if anyone goes from Portugal to Laos, they should read this book along the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Railway_Bazaar

camillomiller• 1 year ago

The article not only says that, but even discusses it in detail. One would know that if, you know, one read at least 1/3 of the article before posting a comment.

netsharc3• 1 year ago

Guess who missed the last 1/4 of my first sentence...

Well ok the first 1/4 of that sentence I left unedited so it suggests I didn't read past the first 2 paragraphs...

djcapelis2• 1 year ago

This article is not quite accurate like some of the others that have excitedly reported on this stretch a bit before it’s true. You cannot yet travel this all the way by passenger rail in either theory or practice. By only the narrowest of gaps: LCR ends in Vientiane and the train line to Bangkok terminates at Thanaleng outside town. The distance between them is not far, but it is not connected by rail with passenger service. I tried. I’ve ridden both the LCR, and the SRT service via the Thanaleng shuttle to Nong Khai prior to catching the sleeper to Bangkok. If there was a way to get from one station to another by rail between Thanaleng and Vientiane I would have done it!

This will change when the high speed rail to Bangkok is complete, but we’re not quite there yet.

Hopefully soon. :)

shikon7• 1 year ago

If you need to change trains, you will need to walk (or travel by non-train) some distance in all cases. I wonder, is there a limit to the transfer distance, so that it still counts as traveling by rail only?

djcapelis2• 1 year ago

Yes. It’s a transfer if it’s the same train station. If it isn’t, it isn’t. :)

stuaxo• 1 year ago

It will be possible.

Like many people I've done London to Beijing in the past, and so people will do this in the future too.

teleforce• 1 year ago

Someone please make an adventure game of this epic train journey.

IMHO, the best games are realistic but not feasible in real life for examples GTA and PUBG.

mita99796• 1 year ago

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLps8NIUr8UzUVog-ncsOYbI7k...

Guy from Serbia did it last year.

The longest train journey is epic – but nobody's ever taken it

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