The longest train journey – in 2021
jonworth.eu
The longest train journey – in 2021
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: The longest train journey – in 2021
#2> 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
Re: The longest train journey – in 2021
#3COVID 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.
Re: The longest train journey – in 2021
#4COVID 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.
Re: The longest train journey – in 2021
#5The only sensible measure for the length of a rail journey is distance travelled along the rail!
Re: The longest train journey – in 2021
#6Presumably 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.
Re: The longest train journey – in 2021
#7When 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
Re: The longest train journey – in 2021
#8The 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...
Re: The longest train journey – in 2021
#9The 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 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.
Re: The longest train journey – in 2021
#10Presumably 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_…
How about Lisbon to New York?