The longest train journey is epic – but nobody's ever taken it | Hacker News Reader

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

bigthink.com

103 pointsPaulHoule45 comments

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.

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

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

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

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

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...

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).

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. :)

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?

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

Which would be a problem with connexions through Paris, where (being a symbol or symptom or French centralism) most big train stations are terminus from one direction. Montparnasse, Gare de Lyon, Austerlitz, Gare de l'Est and Gare du Nord are connected via the subway network (or you can walk a 5 minutes stroll between the last two) but you can still get a connection 'through' Paris when buying tickets.

I mean, the subway is still a train. it's just two transfers instead of one?

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/

Amazing! What was your budget? For how long?

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!

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

> 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

Oh I think this is just finding the graph diameter

Longest shortest path. Checks out.

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.

>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.

Because not only does the train trip become theretical, but so does the person taking the trip.

There's zero people in this world that don't have to avoid certain countries. Even if you magically get a visa for every country (and I would only describe 1/4 visas in my passport as trivial), that's not a guarantee you will be able to actually enter and leave the country uninterrupted.

Every single person that visited a ridiculous amount of countries has at least one story to tell about how they were apprehended and accused of being a spy. Using fringe little train lines usually not taken by anyone non-local would raise even more red flags than doing the same with other types of transport (motorcycle / bike / car).

There's nothing magical about getting to travel to the countries in this trip (I'm not the world's biggest traveller, and I've visited all of the ones in the longest trip he lists except 2 - and those two would be trivial to add too).

Paranoid much? It's not for the average Joe Tourist, but tons of people do such big trips (including friends). And I know people who did it in way more dangerous itineraries. Think Africa or Latin America.

Actually, a friend finished Canada all the way down to Tierra del Fuego Argentina 2 years ago on bike, and I'd be much more worried for some of the Central and Latin American countries he passed, than e.g. the train trip from Portugal across Europe to Singapore via China. Aside from the currently in effect sanctions against Russia, those are all trivial.

I don't even know what "There's zero people in this world that don't have to avoid certain countries" is supposed to mean. Why would they have to avoid certain countries (aside from not having the guts, or following some state "advisory")? Are they wanted or something?

Trivial matter 99% of time for a very narrow subset of the world's population (probably on the order of 5-10%). Often a very difficult and expensive process for the rest of us.

In the 60s and early 70s regular 18-20-something kids would do such trips in a bus. Like Greyhound level of "comfort". Europe to India.

Still today people have done such trips even on foot with a backpack.

But of course there's always an excuse.

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.

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.

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.

Having trouble squaring that with a zoomed out view. It's never been easier to travel the world than the last 20ish years.

I think we should separate technical and legal aspects of traveling.

As for the technical ones, obviously. Cicero could not take a plane to Alexandria.

But when it comes to legal aspects of traveling, crossing boundaries of major entities (the EU, USA) has become a good opportunity to harass and randomly reject people depending on what passport they carry. Even here on HN people now discuss that they started avoiding the US because of unfriendly border checks and a risk of detention.

The EU isn't as harsh as the US, but still, if you are a North African and want to visit the other side of the Mediterranean, you will have to satisfy a lot more bureaucratic conditions than when North Africa was part of the Roman Empire.

Even Australians and Canadians visiting the UK now face more (although not massively more) immigration-related hurdles than when their countries were part of the defunct British Empire.

If you are an American, you may not feel this development, but if you are, say, Syrian or Lebanese who wants to travel (not to mention Gazan), you would be better off being a Roman citizen than wielding the passport of your now-independent country in 2025.

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.

What?

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.

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.

also available on youtube. same channel

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

Guy from Serbia did it last year.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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...

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