The world's longest passenger train journeys, ranked by distance

Ask which train journey is the longest in the world and most people picture the Trans-Siberian rolling across Russia for a week. It comes close — but it is not the record holder. Ranked strictly by single scheduled services that need no change of train, the longest passenger routes on Earth are all clustered across Russia and China, with the great trans-continental classics of Canada and Australia trailing some way behind.

To keep the comparison honest, only direct services count here: journeys a traveller can board once and stay aboard until the end, without connecting to a separate train. That rules out stitched-together epics such as London to Beijing, which is really a Eurostar, a Russian service and the Trans-Siberian bolted together. On that single-service basis the winner is a route few travellers have ever heard of.

The longest of them all: Moscow to Pyongyang

The record holder is the Moscow–Pyongyang service, a set of North Korean through carriages hauled across the width of Russia and into the DPRK. The scheduled distance is about 10,267 km and the journey takes roughly eight and a half days — around 206 hours — which works out to an average of under 50 km/h. It is less a train than a slow-moving border crossing on rails, threading Siberia before turning south toward the Korean Peninsula.

It is also the one route on this list with the most complicated recent history. The service was suspended in February 2020 as pandemic border closures took hold, and it stayed dormant for more than four years. It only resumed in June 2025, now running twice a month. So while the distance figure is genuine, for much of the period since this analysis was first compiled the train was not actually running.

Russia's network sets the scale

Behind Pyongyang, the top of the table is Russian territory. The classic Trans-Siberian run, Moscow to Vladivostok, is 9,289 km — the longest railway line in the world — covered by the direct Rossiya train in about seven days across eight time zones. Moscow to Beijing then splits into two historic routings: the Trans-Manchurian at roughly 8,961 km via Chita, and the shorter Trans-Mongolian at about 7,620 km through Ulaanbaatar. Add the domestic marathons from Moscow deep into the Russian Far East and the pattern is clear: sheer national size, not high-speed ambition, is what puts a route near the top of the distance ranking.

Distance rewards the size of a country; speed rewards its engineering. Russia wins the first contest and China, comfortably, the second.

China runs the longest — and by far the fastest

China supplies most of the rest of the top twenty, and its trains cover the ground very differently. The country's longest single service, Guangzhou to Lhasa on train Z264, runs 4,980 km in about 53 hours, climbing from the humid southern coast up onto the oxygen-thin Tibetan Plateau. Shanghai to Lhasa is a similar epic at around 4,373 km.

What sets the Chinese routes apart is pace. Where the trans-Siberian services plod along at 50 to 55 km/h, China's long-distance trains average closer to 95 km/h — the Guangzhou–Urumqi service tops the group at roughly 97 km/h. If the Moscow–Pyongyang route were run at Chinese speeds, its eight-and-a-half-day crossing could be done in a little over four days.

The long-haul classics: Canada and Australia

Two of the world's most celebrated journeys sit lower down the distance table but higher in the traveller's imagination. VIA Rail's Canadian, Toronto to Vancouver, covers about 4,466 km over four days and four nights — the longest passenger route in North America. In the United States the longest single service is the Chicago–Los Angeles run, formed by through cars on the Texas Eagle and Sunset Limited, at roughly 4,390 km. And Australia's Indian Pacific, Sydney to Perth, crosses the continent in about 4,352 km over some 70 hours, taking in the world's longest dead-straight stretch of track across the Nullarbor Plain.

These routes are priced and marketed as experiences rather than transport, which is why a berth on the Canadian can cost several times more than a comparable distance in Russia or China. The journey, not the destination, is the product.

A note on timetables

Rail timetables move. Distances are stable, but services are not: the Russian and China–Russia international trains were heavily disrupted from 2020 onward, and several were suspended entirely before some resumed years later. The figures here reflect scheduled operation as compiled for early 2022, with the Moscow–Pyongyang restart of 2025 noted where relevant. Anyone planning one of these journeys should confirm the current timetable directly with the operator.

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