| Comment | railway gauges are the limiting factor here and Russia uses a different gauge to Europe (Russian vs Standard gauge), and China uses a different one again
normal practice is 'gauge swapping' at borders (you switch the rolling stock onto different bogeys), but there are also variable gauge trains which can run on both - these are used for the Moscow - Paris/Berlin services
China is also introducing these to provide direct through services, so in time the kind of thing I'm proposing might be a single freight engine
So basically it's complicated, and depends on how you define a 'train' - so-called 'block trains' simply refer to a contiguous unit of freight, and we even now have 'intermodal block trains' (i.e. seamless freight transport over rail and sea links) which if you stretched your rules really far would get you from UK to Japan in a single step https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2021/03/03/maersk-to-pioneer-first-ever-block-train-japan-uk-via-transiberian-railway - it wouldn't be a single train, but if you climbed into one of the containers on the train at one end you'd still get to your destination on a train with the same overall configuration without having to get off or change at any point :) |
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