The longest train journey – in 2021 | Hacker News Reader

The longest train journey – in 2021

jonworth.eu

79 pointsanonymfus43 comments

> This cannot mean the longest trip by train in terms of time or in terms of total length of track covered – we could put in dozens of interim stops to make a trip as long as possible

I think the longest shortest path between two cities would make more sens than the geodesic distance

Essentially what we're looking for is the Graph Diameter[1] of the global train network.

[1] https://mathworld.wolfram.com/GraphDiameter.html

Presumably the only way that this record could be significantly improved upon would be if Malaysia was connected to Indonesia (perhaps via the proposed Malacca Strait Bridge[0]) and then extended further if Sumatra and Java were connected (via the proposed Sunda Strait Bridge[1]). Beyond that, a rail connection from Asia to New Guinea or Australia is a lot harder to imagine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malacca_Strait_Bridge

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunda_Strait_Bridge

How about Lisbon to New York?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing

It'd be extremely difficult to make a crossing of the bering strait work practically.

It's not just the technical challenges of building a bridge or a tunnel in pretty harsh conditions. It's also that on the russian side there is a huge area that has almost no human settlements and no infrastructure. You'd have to build a train line through an area of nothing. That also means it's difficult to imagine intermediate steps (e.g. first building half the rail line to even get there).

Luckily you could transport the stuff you need by rail.

The North American side isn't much better. There's ~1000km from the Bering Strait to Fairbanks, which is the nearest road/rail connection in Alaska. But the Alaska Railroad isn't connected to the rest of North America--you need another ~1500km to connect to the railheads in Canada that would let you travel to any major city in North America. (By comparison, the Russian side is ~2800km from Yakutsk to the Bering Strait).

It should be noted that just because there's no major settlements in a vast area doesn't mean there's nothing there. The Alaska/rest of North America rail connection is constantly being proposed on the basis of being able to hook up mineral extraction operations in the region, although these are marginal enough that the proposals keep falling through. Similarly, the Yakutsk-Magadan region once hosted several industrial concerns along the highway there, but the fall of the Soviet Union caused those production centers to lose viability and collapse.

The fact that Chukotka is sparsely populated wouldn't be such an obstacle in itself. It could even be advantageous = no NIMBYs preventing the construction of the railway. The intermediate steps are manageable - after all the Transsiberian Railway was built in the wilderness in the 1890s and early 1900s with much more primitive technology than is available today.

But the terrain between Yakutsk / Nizhny Bestyakh (the closest rail terminus) is pretty bad, bad enough that the construction does not make economical sense at all. The soil moves during the thaw/freeze cycle etc.

The Russians did the same when they built the BAM (Baikal-Amur Magistral).

By the notion of distance from the article (great circle distance around the earth), Lisbon to New York is considerably shorter than the current record.

Tralee, Ireland is slightly further to the west than Lagos, Portugal, so in geodesic distance I suppose it's further. A pity that there are no plans for a rail tunnel to Ireland at all.

Plenty of proposals, but nothing particularly live - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_British_Isles_fixed_s...

When you maximize for geodesic distance, why would you go over Sweden and Finland? There are more direct ways to connect e.g. Frankfurt to Moscow, while leaving all the other things the same, so having the same geodesic distance.

Edit: Ah, I missed that: Ways around borders closed to passenger trains due to COVID and political tensions in Europe

The only sensible measure for the length of a rail journey is distance travelled along the rail!

That would mean that a journey around a Circle Line[0], arriving where you departed, could have potentially infinite length. In fact, if you don't rule out travelling along the same stretch of rail twice, then any return journey could be of unbounded length despite not covering any net distance. Calculating the "longest train journey" then becomes a question of human endurance/longevity/wealth rather than about geography or transport.

Alternatively, if you measure "the distance travelled along the rail, without double counting" then the longest journey is probably equal to the total length of the installed rail network in Eurasia, which is an interesting statistic and a challenging optimisation problem, but hard to consider as a single journey.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_Line

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...

What if the longest distance meant "longest shortest rail distance between two points".

Ie, the longest track distance between any two places on Earth, subject to the constraint that there is no shorter train journey between those two points.

This seems to me to be a much more logical, and also more interesting, interpretation of the question than the one used in the article.

Wouldn't that simply be the "shortest rail distance between two points"?

Not exactly. Parent is describing the graph diameter [1].

[1]- https://mathworld.wolfram.com/GraphDiameter.html

Well, no. The shortest rail distance between two points is very very short, because you can choose the two points very close to one another.

Oh, right. Fair enough. The two points with the longest shortest-path, with no fixed choice of points.

But then you can just zigzag through Europe. That's no useful measure. You at least need a further limitation.

COVID cuy the rope for many things barely tethered, such as international rail travel, so I'm not confident that we will see trains such as Paris-Moscow and Moscow-Beijing back as regular service.

At least in Europe there is a push to bring back overnight trains as an alternative to carbon-intensive flying. So it's not totally out of the realm of impossibility, particularly if things like carbon taxes change the equations.

Is there?

I mean I know there's "Year of Rail" and all that, but that doesn't seem to translate to anything more than words right now. (Like - no actual trains you could book.) The number of night trains has decreased over the last couple of years. It'd be nice if that trend would be reversed, but that will take more than proclaiming a year of rail.

Right now, and for the first time in over a decade I can again book a direct night train from Vienna to Paris:

https://www.nightjet.com/en/reiseziele/frankreich

I could book a seat on that train for tonight. AFAIK ÖBB (re-)started that line earlier this month.

Need to give that one a try!

Also, the overnight train connection from Vienna to Hamburg is really convenient. I took it some years ago. If I recall correctly, the train departed at around 20:45 and arrived in Hamburg at 6:45.

Wow, these trains were a regular part of my childhood. I'm amazed they were ever out of service, although sometimes they would be deathly quiet, which was part of their spooky attraction.

The Nightjet network has reconnected to Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris, and OBB seems to be investing heavily. The Thelo trains from Paris-Italy have disappeared, but that was a recently opened service and frankly not very good when I rode it. When DB pulled out it looked like the end of an era, but European night trains are in better shape now than they have been for a long time, Covid notwithstanding.

Yes.

France brought back a bunch of national night trains. ÖBB brought back Paris-Vienna, and they have more plans. Sbb brought back Amsterdam-Zürich, also planning train to Barcelona. Sweden wants to get back into Europe (not successful yet). Poland wants to connect west again.

There's a bunch of private endeavors: berlin-Malmo-stockholm is running more often, there's a startup starting a Prag-Berlin-amsterdam-brussels service in spring '22, another older company started Alps-munich-hamburg-coast this year. There's a startup that announced all sorts of impossible routes out of Paris. Another announced brussel-berlin.

The bottom on night trains was 2017. Jon Worth probably has a bunch of opinions about that.

> Sweden wants to get back into Europe (not successful yet)

SJ (Swedish State Railways) won the Swedish government's tender to provide night train services Stockholm - Hamburg starting in summer 2022.

In the UK there's been a £150m refurbishment of the Caledonian Sleeper trains from London to Scotland[0].

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-47887656

That one didn't go so well. I was supposed to ride that (London -> Fort William) in the summer of 2019, but the new trains had so many issues we were stuck on the same rolling stock that had been around when I was a child.

Hopefully it's in service now, but last time I looked it up, there were still issues.

Yes, I should have put a disclaimer in, but I think the teething issues are largely settled. The point was that the investment was there though.

And to the original point that "at least in Europe there is a push to bring back overnight trains as an alternative to carbon-intensive flying", there is this from 5 days ago: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/europe-is-undergoing-a-slee... which leads with the Caledonian Sleeper, and mentions others such as the new Paris-based Midnight Trains, the revival of the Trans-Europe Express, Czech-based RegioJet, and ÖBB's Nightjet.

I used a sleeper train recently. Quality varies, and make a big difference on quality of sleep. The old diesel engines that stop at many busy locales are hard to sleep in. It was also pretty expensive, costing a lot more than a short flight (It was also less efficient wrt the route it took versus the airport-to-airport routes planes take).

Sleepers are usually priced to compete not with the flight, but flight + one night at a hotel.

It was expensive even compared to flight plus a hotel/bnb, minus the benefit of an actual hotel room with facilities, peace & quiet, grumpy-ass-conductor etc.

I've always found them more expensive, and rarely get a full night's sleep. But the weird attraction of regularly waking up in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes getting down from the train to walk around for a while, always kept me using them instead of cheap flights.

It's not a long route, just 3.5 hours one way, but they are preparing to restart the "allegro" (St Petersburg - Helsinki) high-speed train service soon, iirc.

The fun part is: Finland now requires a proof of vaccination to enter but doesn't recognize Russian vaccines, and vice versa. So as a Russian, if you really want, you could get Pfizer or something in countries that would let you enter with a PCR test or recognize Sputnik V, and then you'll have a EU-worthy vaccination certificate. And that's on top of still needing a Schengen visa. So I really don't know who these trains are for right now, besides like 5 people I know who did that exact thing above.

They did restart it on last Sunday. Link in Finnish: https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-12222441

The link states that two daily Allegro services have been re-instantiated. Due to Russian legislation, using the service is only possible for Finnish and Russian citizens. It is true that EU and Russia do not recognise each other's vaccines, but a negative test result allows travel. Russia seems to require a test result in any cases. It is possible that Finnish government starts requiring a negative test result on the Russian border, too, due to the omicron breakout.

I am a Russian citizen, so no problem here, but funnily, I have no idea what Russian rules for crossing the border are now because last time I was abroad was in 2019. But judging by my friends' posts on social media, crossing in an out of Russia by plane is a non-issue, it's crossing into other countries that's complicated.

But then even if you are admitted into the EU, you would be considered non-vaccinated for any place that requires a proof of vaccination, and from what I heard there are many such places.

Do you know if these problems have affected service to Lapland? I'm hoping it hasn't tampered with getting raw materials and seasonal workers to Santa's workshops.

p.s. don't tell the kids, but the best thing about Finland: reindeer steaks. Who knew Rudolph was so tasty?

Night trains were on hiatus in 2020. Daytime trains have ran daily.

On top of that, the finnish embassy basically says "Yes, we can issue you a finnish visa, but you should not count on being admitted to Finland with that visa", and that is on top of having a valid PCR test.

That's why I hold my expectations really low about international train travel. With airplanes it's actually much simpler, since air travel acts as a network and routes around failures (such as, even if you can't get from country A to country B directly, you can usually go transitting via country C without any restrictions).

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