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The longest train journey – in 2021

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Re: The longest train journey – in 2021

#21

Post by grishka »

fabioborellini wrote: post #16
grishka wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recogni…

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 case…

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.

Re: The longest train journey – in 2021

#22

Post by adrianN »

hannob wrote: post #11
bloat wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Luckily you could transport the stuff you need by rail.

Re: The longest train journey – in 2021

#23

Post by m-i-l »

hannob wrote: post #12
bobthepanda wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: The longest train journey – in 2021

#24

Post by Chris2048 »

ccalloway wrote: post #9
dane-pgp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 geogr…

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"?

Re: The longest train journey – in 2021

#25

Post by Chris2048 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #4
thriftwy wrote: post #3

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.

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).

Re: The longest train journey – in 2021

#26

Post by ExtraE »

Chris2048 wrote: post #24
ccalloway wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: The longest train journey – in 2021

#27

Post by jcranmer »

hannob wrote: post #11
bloat wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

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.

Re: The longest train journey – in 2021

#28

Post by [deleted] »

dane-pgp wrote: post #6

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_…

[deleted]

Re: The longest train journey – in 2021

#29

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

m-i-l wrote: post #23
hannob wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The longest train journey – in 2021

#30

Post by ccalloway »

Chris2048 wrote: post #24
ccalloway wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

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.
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