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The mountains of northern Laos are beautiful, but tough to negotiate. By car, it can easily take 15 hours to drive the 373 miles (600 km) of winding roads that separate the capital Vientiane from the town of Boten on the Chinese border.
Since December 2021, there’s a far straighter, much faster alternative: the brand-new high-speed Laos-China Railway (LCR) measures just 257 miles (414 km) between Boten and Vientiane, and fast trains cover that distance in three and a half hours.
The line is a marvel of engineering: It includes no fewer than 75 tunnels, which make up 47% of its total length, and 167 bridges, accounting for a further 15%. By all accounts, the views — outside of those tunnels — are spectacular.
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But the LCR is more than a scenic extension of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. For train enthusiasts around the globe, it is the final piece of a much grander puzzle — for this stretch is also part of the longest possible train journey in the world.
With the completion of the LCR, you can now board a train in Lagos — no, not the former capital of Nigeria, but the sleepy town in Portugal’s deep south that the other Lagos most likely was named after — and travel all the way to Singapore.
That’s a distance by rail of 11,654 miles (18,755 km), crossing 13 countries, eight time zones, and (if you plan your connections well and don’t miss any) taking about 14 days. Taking that train all the way from Portugal to Singapore would carry you halfway across the world. With some luck, you’ll see wild elephants frolicking in the fields of Southeast Asia as your train shoots past.
Train journeys don’t come more epic than that. Even the legendary Orient Express, which in its heyday carried passengers between Paris and Istanbul — a distance of a mere 1,700 miles (2,750 km), pales in comparison. No, this is closer to Snowpiercer, the (fictional) train 1,000 carriages long that circles a postapocalyptic Earth in a continuous loop.
The idea of the world’s longest train journey animates the imaginations of world travelers (both of the real and armchair varieties), so it’s no surprise that this map has been bouncing around the internet for the past couple of years. But examine this Portugal-to-Singapore train trek a bit closer, and you’ll find that it has a few strange issues, including (but not limited to) the fact that… nobody has ever completed it.
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The first problem is definitional: How can any trip be the longest if you can just add a diversion? Say, a return to Marseille from Paris. Or reroute this trip via Vietnam? That last option was actually considered the world’s longest train journey until it was shortened by the LCR. After all, the definition of the longest possible train journey is “the shortest possible route between the two farthest possible stations.”
The second problem is more philosophical in nature. The train you take in Lagos is not the train that drops you off in Singapore. You have to change about 20 times. Nor can you buy a single ticket in Portugal that gets you all the way to the gleaming city-state at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. Each of those separate trains requires a separate reservation. So, how does this even count as one train trip?
This is a locomotive version of the old Ship of Theseus paradox: If the Athenians, in reverence to their minotaur-slaying hero, replace old parts of his ship to preserve it, does it still count as the same ship when they’ve replaced them all? This question divided Greek philosophers, but rather than rehash their arguments, let’s say it is the same ship (and thus the same train trip), and get to the next problem.
That problem is practical in nature. It’s not so much that the service from Lisbon to Hendaye, in the southwest corner of France, has been abolished since this map first popped up on Reddit (you can still get from Lagos to Paris via trains from Lisbon to Madrid, Barcelona, and Lyon). Rather, it’s that the Paris to Moscow Express route, which was suspended in 2020 due to COVID, remains out of service due to sanctions against Russia following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Those sanctions have shut down all international train traffic between Russia (and Belarus) and the rest of Europe.
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Otherwise, you could indeed carry on from Moscow to Beijing on the Trans-Mongolian. This would be the longest leg of your (theoretical) trip, taking five days to cover 4,736 miles (7,622 km). If you’re lucky enough to get a ticket, that is. Passenger traffic on this line is severely limited, which is also a result of sanctions, and so your best alternative might be the longer Trans-Manchurian line, which links Moscow and Beijing but bypasses Mongolia.
From the Chinese capital, you would then hop on the high-speed train to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. This train covers a distance of 1,715 miles (2,760 km) in just under 11 hours, making it the longest high-speed line in the world. For comparison, the Trans-Mongolian travels at an average speed of 38 mph (61.5 km/h). The Beijing to Kunming bullet train averages 156 mph (251 km/h), which is more than four times faster.
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The (now-completed) LCR takes you from Kunming to Vientiane, a total distance of 643 miles (1,035 km), covered in approximately 9.5 hours, at an average speed of 67.7 mph (109 km/h). This is the first leg of the Kunming to Singapore line, and the only one that has been converted to high-speed rail.
- Vientiane to Bangkok is 424 miles (683 km), currently connected via a daily sleeper service that takes about 12 hours, at an average speed of about 37 mph (59.5km/h). A high-speed line, already partly under construction, would reduce travel to around three to four hours.
- The trip from Bangkok to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur is about 932 miles (1,500 km), currently requires a transfer at Padang Besar on the Thai-Malaysian border, and takes up to 24 hours, at an average speed of 40 mph (65km/h). A proposed high-speed line could reduce travel time to anywhere from six to eight hours.
- Kuala Lumpur to Singapore is 218 miles (350 km), and currently takes five to six hours by train, at an average speed of 39 mph (63 km/h). Planning for a high-speed line was paused during COVID, but has since resumed. It would reduce travel time to 90 minutes.
If and when all those stretches are upgraded to high-speed rail, the so-called Pan Asian Railway will dramatically reduce travel time from Kunming to Singapore — a distance of about 2,097 miles (3,374 km) — from 80 to 90 hours currently (accounting for delays, customs and transfers) to between 15 and 20 hours (assuming fully upgraded lines, and optimised customs and transfer procedures).
Whether on today’s conventional tracks or on the high-speed rail of the future, the end of your trip will carry you across the Johor-Singapore Causeway, a 0.66-mile railway and motorway bridge linking Johor Bahru in Malaysia across the narrow Straits of Johor with the district (and station) of Woodlands in Singapore. Accommodating over 350,000 travellers daily, this is one of the busiest border crossings anywhere. And it feels more than half a world away from the sleepy Algarve town of Lagos, where this theoretical journey started.
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But — and this is a crucial problem — Lagos is the wrong starting point; at least according to The Man in Seat 61, an online authority on all things rail: “Villa Real de Santo Antonio to Lisbon is significantly longer than Lagos to Lisbon, (so) that’s the world’s longest train journey”.
And the concept suffers from further defects. The actual shortest route requires travellers to skip some of the faster main lines for various regional lines where trains are much slower, fewer, and farther apart. In some cities, changing trains means changing stations, which may mean either a long walk, or a bus or taxi ride.
The advice emanating from seat 61: “If (as I fervently hope) the war ends and such a journey becomes safe and practicable once more, don’t bother starting from Portugal. Start from your local station in the UK or wherever you live, your journey will be amazing enough. No need to chase a flawed and possibly unattainable concept.”
A less flawed concept: the longest train journey without changing trains. Here, we have a clear winner, acknowledged by Guinness World Records. Once a week, a train leaves Moscow and travels 6,346 miles (10,214 km) before arriving in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, seven days and 20 hours later. This service uses sections of the famous Trans-Siberian line, which links Moscow to Vladivostok, and is often (erroneously) hailed as the world’s longest single-train service.
As that last example shows, there is a lot of room for disagreement between train travel fundamentalists. But perhaps there is value in the old axiom: It’s about the journey, not the destination. Speaking of which, here are those frolicking elephants:
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Strange Maps #1272
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