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Comment by akadruid | Hacker News Reader

The travel times are unduly pessamistic. Australia is an edge case - the reason that travelling London to Australia takes so long is largely due to poor overland connections after you reach southeast Asia. You can travel by train from London to e.g. Beijing in around 10-11 days.

London to Rome can be done comfortably and cheaply by train in under 24 hours. Some people prefer this to flying.

The website seat61.com has a huge amount of info on travelling internationally by rail.

Also I suspect rail travel would suddenly recieve a lot of investment should air travel become impossible.

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Yes, in a true plane-free world you'd probably get from London to Sydney by taking a train to Shanghai or Bangkok or something and then catching a ship to take you the rest of the way.

Or with a bit of high-speed rail development, get a train to India, a boat across the Indian Ocean to Perth, and then a two-day high-speed train across Australia.

This actually sounds like fun the first time, but if you had to do it regularly you'd be missing the 23 hour plane ride pretty quick.

Travel itself should be quite ok even regularly, it certainly wouldn't be just siting in your seat for 2 days and looking out of the window, more like a hotel on rails. But I'd very afraid of bureaucracy: entry visa, transit visa, various railway companies and their mess of various offers and discounts… Land trip across Asia means passing through countries like Iran, China or Russia. And given how unkind seems rail travel even within EU's borders (where only the last problems applies, and you can get all schedule informations you need by just typing your destination at http://oebb.at or similar site) for many people, and not because the length of the trip.

On the other hand, it would be wonderful business opportunity for travel agencies. And much more interesting than just booking the right plane. I almost want it to happen :-)

Last December I flew SFO to Buenos Aires to SFO to Sydney to SFO in the space of a month. If I'd done that via land and sea I would have spent the whole month on a vehicle. (Actually it kinda felt that way anyway).

It's fine to trave by train if it takes less than 12 hours. otherwise, flights 12h*300KMpH = 3600 KM. it's almost the whole EU

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