For people travelling in Europe: The German railway company Deutsche Bahn has the most complete set of international train schedules in their system. This makes it a great resource to search for international connections. Once I even saw Hungarian railway employees use www.bahn.de to look up their own connections.
French train traveler here. I concur. I use them to travel from France to Italy through Germany and Austria. bahn.de is a great resource and so is their Android app. Even in France, I sometimes use their schedules rather than the local ones, because they give me every single train station a train is going to stop at, which is useful information you don't get everywhere.
Take a step back when booking, though. It can suggest trips with tens of connections without taking delays into account (and it's rare, if not impossible, to not have some delay with that many connections).
I follow this site for a while and actually thought about doing the Trans-Siberian road from Moscow to Siberia (Around 9000 KM) and it's by far the longest railway line in the world.
The reasons I didn't went to it was because I couldn't see my self sitting for so many hours a day.
But I guess my destiny was different than I expected.
A few months ago I got an offer to participate in a 22,000KM journey called the 'Mongol Rally' which is basically a race when you need to drive from the Czech Republic to Mongolia in a shitty car.
Joining this race meant sitting in a car for at least 14 hours a day
I agreed to the offer without thinking twice
and after I finish it, doing the Trans-Siberian road looks like a piece of cake
One nice thing about trains is that you don't need to just sit: there is a lot of room to move about. Also, the trains you use on the Trans-Siberian route stop all the time, often for half an hour or longer at a time, so you can get off the train for some proper exercise. Still, I would not recommend doing the trip on one go: 24 hours is just about long enough stretch to spend onboard any train. There are a lot of cities worth visiting along the way.
The train do stop but the amount of stops depends on how long you can go for your trip
In my case I had only 6 weeks for the Mongol Rally so we drove every day 14 hours in the car
I'm not sure how long it takes to do the Trans-Siberian route, but if I will do it I will make sure I have enough time to have few days in nice places along the way.
The disjointed nature of train companies and their booking systems used to make planning an inter-country trip effectively impossible without either (a) huge amounts of time to do research or (b) get professional advice. This site straddles those options and makes it easy to know where to go, including extra touches like photos showing you the way to a station on another line when interchanging at San Sebastián.
There is so many good things to say about seat61.com . First it is of course an invaluable source of information for any train travel (I used it again this summer for a night train trip from Budapest to Bucarest). But it is also one of these few web site that still retain this "end of the 90's" look and feel. And more important than the "look" is the "feel" : behind this web site there is no huge corporation trying to steal your data and sell you stuff, but one man that is really passionate about train travel, sharing his passion and trying to help as many people as he can.
Site seems to be down at the moment (HN kiss of death I presume) but there is a donation section that is well hidden. And guess what : donations are not for "the man in seat61", but for helping people in Syria (or it was two months ago when I visited this section). I suggest anyone that has found this site helpful to at least visit this section.
This was an amazing resource for me. i travelled from Singapore to London by land this year using buses and trains and the info on this site really helped. What I came to appreciate from this trip is that it’s possible to travel across the world using public transport.
I took about three and a half months. The trip can be done much faster if the goal is to reach London ASAP - I estimate about 17 days. I spent about a month in China exploring it using her High Speed Trains. Also stayed in cities for varying durations depending on the feel of the city.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895833