18hr 25min layover in Moscow

June 6, 2019 9:06 PM

The longest train ride in the world.
posted by Chrysostom (14 comments total)

A variant of this, going via a more southerly route through Turkey, Lake Van to Iran, Turkmenistan, etc, then Xinjiang over to Shanghai then down to Vietnam has always been my dream. I've always had difficulty with the Mashhad to Ashgabat section, but worst case I guess a cab would work.

... and nowadays I'll never get to go. Damn geopolitics.
posted by aramaic at 9:27 PM on June 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Hmm. I challenge the inclusion of two subway rides as "train rides."
posted by praemunire at 9:33 PM on June 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Once in France, it’s a transfer onto the TGV (but not the high-speed trains, which won’t ply this particular route until 2017)

So they copy-pasted an article from 2011, didn't bother to update it even though the original was self-admittedly based on only a few days of Googling random sites, and still slapped a "June 6, 2019" dateline on top.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 9:48 PM on June 6, 2019 [8 favorites]

Hmm. I challenge the inclusion of two subway rides as "train rides."

I challenge using multiple trains as being the longest "train ride". I’m pretty sure that belongs to the Trans-Siberian.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:37 PM on June 6, 2019 [9 favorites]

Seat61 has always been my favourite site for this kind of thing; here's the suggested itinerary to get from London to Australia without flying (although not trains all the way).
posted by invokeuse at 10:42 PM on June 6, 2019 [8 favorites]

Just reading the itinerary is exhausting!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:21 PM on June 6, 2019

Just over two weeks, and minimum 2,000 USD. Not counting all the meals along the way. Sounds great for a rich person with no responsibility--I don't qualify.
posted by zardoz at 12:51 AM on June 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

A travel agency in the UK is currently offering a tour charting communism from Wigan to Pyongyang via London, Brussels, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, Ulaanbaatar and Beijing. A bit shorter at only 9,000 miles over multiple trains.
posted by kerplunk at 2:59 AM on June 7, 2019

I remember that, in the 00s, someone in Russia was proposing a rail link across the Bering Strait, providing freight rail links between Eurasia and North America. It never got built (for obvious reasons; geopolitics aside, that’d have been thousands of kilometres of tracks across inhospitable tundra), though had it, one could have gone from one side of the Atlantic to the other the long way by rail.
posted by acb at 4:13 AM on June 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

This was disappointing; I was hoping that he'd actually been on this train ride.

We'll always have this.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 5:30 AM on June 7, 2019

The Cosmopolitan Railway was a proposal for a rail link between North America and Eurasia as early as the 19th century.
posted by plep at 7:59 AM on June 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

I don't understand - it says:

In fact, you can make an even longer trip right now and never leave the train except for switching cars.

And then goes on to detail a journey that requires changing onto 10 different trains. What am I missing?

And it starts with a photo of the Glenfinnan Viaduct, in Scotland, nowhere near any of this.
posted by penguin pie at 2:17 PM on June 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

It says: "In fact, you can make an even longer trip right now and
never leave the train except for switching cars."

And then goes on to detail a journey that requires changing
onto 10 different trains. What am I missing?

An editor? Well, I don’t mean you personally are missing an editor but the person who wrote the article certainly was.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:18 PM on June 7, 2019 [5 favorites]

This was disappointing; I was hoping that he'd actually been on this train ride.

I was hoping this was one of those SlowTV videos.

We'll always have this.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:42 PM on June 9, 2019