
The world’s longest train journey now begins in China - edward
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/11/21/map-the-worlds-longest-train-journey-now-begins-in-china/
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grecy
My friend just took a train journey from London to Hong Kong.. They obviously
switched trains a few times, but essentially, the entire trip was on trains.
He said it was amazing

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3rd3
How expensive is such a trip?

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grecy
Just got this email from my friend

All in, it was just under £10k (for two people)

Trains London to St Petersburg

London to Brussels - £100 Eurostar Brussels to Cologne - 58 Euro - Bahn.de
(about £45) Koln to Prague - 138 Euro - Bahn.de (about £109) Prague to Krakow
(three trains) - 488PLN - Polrail.com (about £92) Krakow to Warsaw - 140PLN -
Polrail.com (about £26) Warsaw to Minsk - 698PLN - Polrail.com (about £132)
Minsk to St Petersburg - £284.72 - realrussia.com

Accommodation Krakow - £68.22 lastminute.com Accommodation Warsaw - £38.76
lastminute.com

Other nights from London to St Petersburg were on trains

Tour - £5995 -all trains from St Petersburg to Hong Kong -all accommodation
from St Petersburg to Xi'an -more than half the meals (apart from when on the
train) -transfers to and from all stations -all guides and tours -all visas

Accommodation Hong Kong - £304.96 - Not sure where booked

Spending money - £1640

Flight HK to Melbourne - $HK9076 (about £746) Travel Insurance - $AUD324
(about £172)

Total: £9753

Polrail.com and realrussia.com are agencies and so added about 25-30% on top
of the ticket prices, but the Polish and Russian rail websites aren't in
English so didn't have much choice there. The Polish accommodation was pretty
swanky and right next to the stations, there were much cheaper options, but
splashed out a bit. Travel insurance was required for our visas; we had
trouble finding anyone to insure us because we weren't finishing where we
departed from. Spending money was under what we budgeted. The tour was
obviously the big expense, doing it ourselves would have been a lot harder,
but would have saved a lot of money, but then we'd have to have gone and lined
up to get visas whereas they did that for us. Also having someone standing on
the platform with a sign with our name on and then being driven to our hotel
was pretty cool :)

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ethana
They've also proposed a China-Russia-US Railway that have an under water
channel between Russian and Alaska. That would be the longest under channel if
it were to be built.

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seanmcdirmid
I doubt they'll do that anytime soon. There are no continental railways to
connect to in Alaska, and not much demand for one.

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jrockway
Freight?

Whenever I have something shipped from China, the tracking shows something
like China -> Alaska -> California. (Of course, bulk goods go by boat, but a
train could be a nice middle ground.)

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ghaff
The great circle air route between Chinese manufacturing hubs and SFO passes
quite close to Anchorage. Not sure why they stop there--refueling isn't
necessarily needed so it's probably a hub to offload some cargo for points
further east. Going up through Russia and under the Bering Strait would
actually go quite a ways north of that route all other considerations aside.

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mikeash
Refueling isn't necessary (there are daily nonstop flights from Washington, DC
to Beijing, for example) but having an intermediate stop may allow them to
carry more cargo on each flight, as air freight is probably weight constrained
rather than volume constrained, and less fuel would mean more weight left for
cargo. (I could be wrong on that, of course!)

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ghaff
Looks like you're right: [http://www.adn.com/article/20130630/fedex-cut-trans-
pacific-...](http://www.adn.com/article/20130630/fedex-cut-trans-pacific-
flight-anchorage-cargo-hub)

It also looks as if the FedEx was using planes that didn't necessarily have as
much range as typical passenger aircraft today.

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Htsthbjig
Wow, I have seen it today in Madrid.

I wish it had passengers cars so I could travel on it one day.

The great thing about remote working is that you could do these kind of
things, it will probably need expensive satellite Internet though...

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w1ntermute
This blog chronicles the author's journey from Vienna to Pyongyang, all by
train: [http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/](http://vienna-
pyongyang.blogspot.com/)

It's pretty interesting, especially how he got to spend 36 hours in North
Korea without a guide.

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arbuge
I look forward to a tunnel under the Bering Strait, and trains running from
Miami to Madrid via Alaska and Yiwu.

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a8da6b0c91d
The article never mentions energy efficiency. How does such a rail trip
compare to a mega freighter in joules per ton? The ship has to go through
Malacca and Suez, of course.

On many routes in the US barge transport is still much more efficient than
rail.

