The longest train journey is epic – but nobody's ever taken it

Summary

Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. 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.A high-speed train crosses from China into Laos in one of the many tunnels that were dug for the extension of the LCR from Kunming, in China to Vientiane, the Laotian capital. (Credit: Cao Anning/Xinhua via Getty Images). 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 leg...