This journey goes across 13 countries, and is 11,654 miles or 18,755 kilometres and takes 14 days assuming no connections are missed.
In 1992 my girlfriend and I took trains from Barcelona to Beijing. We went from Barcelona to Paris - Paris to Budapest - Budapest to Chop, Ukraine (railway gauge-break) - Chop to Moscow, Moscow to Zabaikalsk, Russia (railway gauge-break) - Zabaikalsk to Beijing, China. We did not fly, we did not take any buses, the trip was all on trains. It was a challenging time to take this trip because the USSR had collapsed in late 1991.
I believe the total distance of this route is around 7500 miles (12070 km). Once in China we travelled from Beijing to Lanzhou on trains which adds another 1000 miles to the trip. On most of the leg from Beijing to Lanzhou our train was pulled by a coal fired steam engine. From Lanzhou we headed south and had to rely on buses as there were no trains serving the areas we were interested in seeing.
Compared to trains in 1992, long haul buses in western China / eastern Tibet / Southwest China were a very difficult way to travel.
Unlike the the other poster who did a similar trip with his wife, we ended up getting married a few years later and remain together.
Me with ice cream at a stop somewhere in Siberia. (Notice CCCP emblem on front of train)
Street scene in Zabaikalsk while waiting for the bogeys on the train to be changed. (railway gauge-break)
Steam engine from Beijing to Lanzhou.
We continued travelling in southeast Asia for another 6 months and tried to take trains whenever possible.
I love trains.
Wow that is an amazing comment. Better than the post itself actually, by quite the margin. On another not, the trains going from hungary to ukraine are quite strange usually. You took one from budapest, and shortly after the fall of the ussr so it was probably pretty chill actually, but nowadays they are known for being quite bizarre. Theres one that goes(or used to, i dont live in hungary anymore so i dont know how the war effected the trains) from one random town of a few thousand from the west of hungary to another random town of a few thousand in western ukraine. You can meet quite a lot of unique people on these more obscure trains.
