Thread by @jonworth

OK, so I tried to work out if this is possible...

The answer is ⛔️ IT ISN'T ⛔️

At least not now

The 🧵 explains it

https://twitter.com/Locati0ns/status/1470041690492657673

Basically whoever made this map read that there is now a new line through Laos, making the point furthest south east you can reach by train as Woodlands, Singapore 🇸🇬 rather than southern Vietnam 🇻🇳 as it was before

News about the new train 👇
thediplomat.com/2021/12/laos-u…

But the PROBLEM is that politics and COVID have intervened to mean you cannot actually make all parts of this trip connect...

First let's forgive some of the routing on the map - it looks like it crosses the ES-FR border at Hendaye, when we could do that at Perpignan instead

We could also route via Lyon and Strasbourg to avoid Paris

Things like that are minor

What we're talking about here is an uninterrupted rail connection on multiple trains between the two places with the biggest geodesic distance between them - this tool can calculate that:
gps-coordinates.net/distance

Without getting too much into the definitional complexities of it, it looks like this connection - with regular trains - is either Cascais or Sintra near Lisboa 🇵🇹 to Woodlands Singapore 🇸🇬

However there are 2️⃣ major problems with the route... 1 surmountable, just about. The other seems to not be surmountable...

The surmountable one, just about, is to get from Western Europe into Russia

There are no passenger trains across these borders currently, due to politics and COVID
🇵🇱➡️🇱🇹
🇵🇱➡️🇧🇾
🇺🇦➡️🇷🇺
And there have not been for some years
🇵🇱➡️🇷🇺 (Kaliningrad)

You cannot route south of the Black Sea - because even if you take the seasonal Optima Express Villach 🇦🇹 to Edirne 🇹🇷, there are no trains
🇹🇷➡️🇮🇷 (suspended)
🇹🇷➡️🇬🇪 (never introduced as planned)

So that leaves you with 1 route into Russia
🇫🇮➡️🇷🇺
on the Helsinki to St Petersburg Allegro train

But the problem is you can't get to 🇫🇮 from 🇸🇪 without walking from Haparanda station to Tornio Itäinen - 4.6km

Then you can get yourself onto the Trans-Siberian from there... with some changes in Viborg, Tver and Nishniy Novgorod you can even avoid using a metro to cross either St Petersburg or Moscow

(you see by now I have worked pretty hard at this!)

But then 🥁

Where is all breaks down is getting into China 🤯

There are basically 3 possible routes, as this map by @seatsixtyone shows

Going via Kazakhstan to Ürümqi doesn't work as the trains are not running - this from Kazakh railways
bilet-railways-kz.translate.goog/post/schedule?… (Google Translated)

Using the search on the Russian Railways RZD site, I can find trains from Ulan-Ude to Naushki, but not onwards to Ulan Batar 🇲🇳 - Trans Mongolian

And the Trans Manchurian also doesn't work - trains from Chita to Zabaikalsk, but not onwards to Manchzhuriya 🇨🇳

That means that currently the longest possible train connection you can actually *DO* is - roughly - Cascais 🇵🇹 to Vladivostok 🇷🇺 - 10129km, versus the theoretical 11905km from Cascais 🇵🇹 to Woodlands 🇸🇬

At some point in 2022 one of the routes into China might re-open to passenger traffic, and hence a route all the way to Singapore 🇸🇬 might become available

But sorry folks, at the moment, this longest possible train journey that was shown... cannot actually be done

/ends

P.S. I didn't calculate all the bits of this, but Cascais to St Petersburg requires 15 trains (so 14 changes). To get onto the trans-siberian avoiding Moscow needs at least 2 more changes. So you're looking at 20-25 trains for the whole trip...

New thread on this!

https://twitter.com/jonworth/status/1471196122521735177