[HN Gopher] The longest train journey is epic - but nobody's eve...
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The longest train journey is epic - but nobody's ever taken it
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 84 points
Date : 2025-05-17 17:14 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bigthink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bigthink.com)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| hulium wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There's a blog post series from a guy who did this.
|
| https://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-everything...
| jonah wrote:
| I read this blog back in the day. Fascinating saga.
| stop_nazi wrote:
| This opportunity was available before the covid. Now Poland has
| closed the railway connection with Belarus
| netsharc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| russellcoleman wrote:
| > 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
| russellcoleman wrote:
| Oh I think this is just finding the graph diameter
| input_sh wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_cz wrote:
| 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_nazi wrote:
| Now there is no railroad connection between Belarus and Poland.
| Shame!
| posnet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Amazing! What was your budget? For how long?
| reustle wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Fwiw, https://meetup.tokyotech.com/ on https://reustle.org/
| doesn't resolve. I've daydreamed "I arrive in X. Museums?
| Meetups!"
| breakingcups wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| also available on youtube. same channel
| jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
| The idea that nobody has ever taken this journey makes the author
| sound provincial - who's with me?
| bravoetch wrote:
| 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?
| netsharc wrote:
| 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 001E (002E 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 wrote:
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| 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...
| djcapelis wrote:
| 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. :)
| stuaxo wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2025-05-17 23:01 UTC)