13 ms·
The longest train journey – in 2021
- bnegreve 5y ago> 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
- ginko 5y agoEssentially what we're looking for is the Graph Diameter[1] of the global train network. [1] https://mathworld.wolfram.com/GraphDiameter.html https://mathworld.wolfram.com/GraphDiameter.html
- thriftwy 5y agoCOVID 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.
- bobthepanda 5y agoAt 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.
- hannob 5y agoIs 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.
- ginko 5y agoRight 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 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.
- manuel_w 5y agoNeed 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.
- kingcharles 5y agoWow, 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.
- lmm 5y agoThe 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.
- ant6n 5y agoYes. 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.
- Chris2048 5y agoI 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).
- bobthepanda 5y agoSleepers are usually priced to compete not with the flight, but flight + one night at a hotel.
- Chris2048 5y agoIt 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.
- kingcharles 5y agoI'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.
- grishka 5y agoIt'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.
- fabioborellini 5y agoThey did restart it on last Sunday. Link in Finnish: https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-12222441 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.
- grishka 5y agoI 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.
- kingcharles 5y agoDo 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?
- kwhitefoot 5y agoThe only sensible measure for the length of a rail journey is distance travelled along the rail!
- dane-pgp 5y agoThat 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_Line [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_transport_network_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...
- ccalloway 5y agoWhat 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.
- dane-pgp 5y agoPresumably 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malacca_Strait_Bridge [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunda_Strait_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunda_Strait_Bridge
- bloat 5y agoHow about Lisbon to New York? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing
- hannob 5y agoIt'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).
- gpvos 5y agoThe Russians did the same when they built the BAM (Baikal-Amur Magistral).
- adrianN 5y agoLuckily you could transport the stuff you need by rail.
- jcranmer 5y agoThe 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.
- albertzeyer 5y agoWhen 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