The world’s longest train journey now begins in China | Hacker News Reader

The world’s longest train journey now begins in China

washingtonpost.com

64 pointsedward48 comments

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

How expensive is such a trip?

Curious too how much a trip like this would cost

"The Man in Seat 61" has all the info you need. Start here (warning: you may spend as much time on the site as on your trip): http://seat61.com/Trans-Siberian.htm#Fares

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 :)

I read this years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riding_the_Iron_Rooster

I havent gotten to do the TransSiberian but this book led me to spend a few weeks in Mongolia.

When I was young I took a train from Toronto to Vancouver with my grandparents. A great memory.

There was a bus from London to Sydney as well: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-1201095/London-Syd...

Nice.

From 2009-2011 I drove a Jeep Alaska->Argentina. Next year I'll set out on a lap of Africa, then after that I'll be driving my Jeep London->Australia.

My dad drove from Stuttgart to Cape Town in a Citroën 2CV in 1962.

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.

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

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.)

But is there actually enough demand to justify the middle ground?

Seems like the US imports quite a bit of stuff from Asia.

Right, but it also seems massively expensive build rail from Russia to Alaska and from Alaska to the rest of North America. I'm not convinced there's enough demand for imports on the particular schedule of rail to justify that massive expense.

I wasn't sure if "Fright?" was meant to ask if there was a freight rail line with a connection or if you were suggesting that freight traffic would provide the demand.. If the former, the Alaska railroad does not have a rail connection to other railroads in North America. It looks like barges are used to link it to the North American rail network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Railroad

Basically, I'm guessing that people in this thread assumed "rail = passengers" but I'm guessing that's not why a rail link was proposed, that's all. Passenger rail barely makes money (in the US) running tiny distances between population centers. It's probably not going to make money going from the middle of nowhere Alaska across an ocean. But clearly the idea came from somewhere.

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.

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!)

Looks like you're right: http://www.adn.com/article/20130630/fedex-cut-trans-pacific-...

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

Cargo doesn't care about the inconvenience of stopping for gas, and that allows cargo airlines to load the planes heavier (remember that much of a passenger aircraft is filled with air, not cargo). Anchorage is also within a 9-10 hour flight of almost the entire developed world, and massively overbuilt from the days when trans-Pacific aircraft had to stop there due to range limitations.

Yup - Anchorage International is the 2nd busiest cargo hub in the US (after Memphis).

Don't forget the oil, water, electricity and data lines that would also be in the tunnel.

But there is even less in the Russian Far east than Alaska. Water and electricity aren't a problem, data lines go via undersea anyways. Oil...we have tankers and a thawing arctic passage that will pretty soon allow year round shipping.

The U.S. has been occasionally interested in connecting Alaska to the Canadian rail system, independent of any Russian crossing. But Canada seems less interested. Not sure whether the U.S. is really seriously interested in it, or whether it's just pandering to Alaskan politicians. But there have been some attempts to get Canada on board with the possibility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Railroad#Proposed_conne...

I strongly suspect it's serious fantasy-land stuff. The existing Alaska railroad network is essentially a Seward-Anchorage-Fairbanks line. (We won't count the narrow gauge from Whitehorse.) Anchorage has the only sizable population along that line--300K people live there. So to connect to the Canadian railroad system you'd build about 1,000 miles of track. There are apparently some resource extraction reasons to build such a link but my impression is that it's mostly Alaskan politicians who are interested.

That would make little economic sense since shipping is cheaper than trains, and container ships keep getting bigger and more efficient.

Are ships still cheaper if one considers the time and expense of loading/unloading the ship, plus taking containers off and putting them back on rail cars? It seems like the switching of modes could contribute non-negligible overhead. I suppose the impact of the overhead depends on the distance though. China – US might be far enough that the overheads do not matter.

I think it usually goes ship -> truck rather than ship -> train -> truck.

Example at 8:00 here (Turn volume off) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYBImNhYO5U

The wikipedia article on intermodal transport suggests close to 70% of intermodal goes on railroads in the US[0]. I am not sure what the breakdown is in terms of origin (ship vs truck) before it gets on the railway, but it seems reasonable that the ship -> train is at least comparable to, if not larger than ship -> truck. But I imagine it depends on cargo and its final destination. If it's more than a day's drive and is a larger shipment (more than 1 container), I suspect that makes it more likely for a train to get involved.

The same wiki article later says trucks are often used to go between ships and rail[1]; depending on what fraction of shipments experience that, it might be an even stronger argument for rail the whole way, if it saves 2x loading/unloading from trucks.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_freight_transport#C...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_freight_transport#T...

Depends on how fast you want them there. That it's economically senseless is not a done deal.

If you're into reading plans for pie-in-the-sky projects that will never [1] happen, you can read about it here. http://www.interbering.com/

$134 billion price tag and apply the usual multiples including not only the tunnel but lots of connecting rail through what I imagine is pretty difficult-to-build territory. (UPDATE: Of which it seems about 4,000 miles worth is needed.)

Fun read though.

[1] for interesting timeframes to contemplate

This article [1] has the tunnel at only $10 to $12 billion, and the whole rail interconnect at around $65 billion.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a0bsM...

Meanwhile, over in the real world, it's cost 4.5 billion to build a tunnel in Manhattan from 63rd St. to 96th St.

Building under Manhattan is a little bit more complicated, since slight vibrations / rumblings can cause buildings to come deviate from plumb.

http://thelaunchbox.blogspot.com/2009/06/june-6-7-2009.html http://thelaunchbox.blogspot.com/2009/06/june-29-2009.html http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120821/upper-east-side/hug... http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130911/upper-east-side/sec...

If you think far Northern Alaska or Russia are anything like "The Real World" (as you call Manhattan), you need to get out more.

I'm just saying that every megaproject I've ever seen costs some small amount on paper, then the second ground is broken, we start seeing huge cost overruns that make the original number look tiny. 10 billion for a tunnel under the Bering Strait. Suuuure....

What's cool about it is that from an engineering perspective, it's not even hard. We easily have the tech to build it right now, it's more a question of economics.

I believe the price tag has been revised a few times too, as a Japanese company seriously underbid the competition to dig the actually tunnel. This article [1] lists the tunnel as only $10 to $12 billion.

(I live in the Yukon, right near Alaska)

Unfortunately, it likely won't happen until there are very good high-speed trains from that part of Alaska down to the lower 48, and from that part of Siberia over to Moscow, otherwise you'd have an awesome tunnel that goes literally from nowhere to nowhere.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a0bsM...

A simple matter of programming :-)

It's easy to lose track of the distances in that area of the world. According to the site, there would be something like 4,000 miles of track required to connect to existing conventional rail. I doubt the whole project would be "easy" but economics is a showstopper in any case. Any any rate, Russia would need to be a much larger trading partner and--even if they were--it's not clear that easier routes from eastern Russia to the US would be a big win.

> It's easy to lose track of the distances in that area of the world.

Not when you live here :)

I live in the eastern US and I constantly have to remind myself when I'm planning trips out West--even in the lower 48--just how big the relative distances are :-) I'm better at it than I used to be, but it's easy to plan "short" drives that are actually 6-8 hours.

Hahaha. A 6-8 hour drive is short.

It takes a 12 hour drive for me to get to a city bigger than the one I'm in, and it's in another country :)

The closest next-biggest one in the same country is something like 18 hours drive.

It is always amusing when West European friends and relatives visit. Distances are so much shorter there between countries. We are in New York and they'll say "let's drive to Texas tomorrow" thinking it would be a day trip or something of that scale.

A friends cousin from Australia visited Austria and upon hearing that he will drive to another country brought 5 kilos of food and a sleeping bag. The drive was an hour and a half.

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...

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

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

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com