What is the longest train trip you have experienced?

My longest trip by train was from Passau (Bavaria) to Vienna (Austria). It lasted from 9 pm to 8 am the next morning. I was 13 years old and in company of my father. We shared a couchette coach together with four other people, mostly young and men and women together. Although a boy of 13 years I remember vividly the soft pink bra of a young lady. Puberty on it's way.

From Vienna we went by bus to our hotel at Siófok on the southeast shore of Lake Balaton in Hungary. Was a very nice week. It was June, fairly warm there, we could already bath in the lake. Already as a child I've always liked two countries much more than others: Iceland and Hungaria. But I visited them much later, Hungaria at 13 years, Iceland at 24 years.
 

In 1954 I went NY to Chicago. I Chicago I went up on the loop, where I took a train to the Great Lakes naval training center. Two weeks later I went home the reverse way.

In Australia we went Melbourne to Sydney. The local folks were nice and friendly. We saw much more of the countryside than we would have had we flown.

Years later we rode the train up to the Copper Canyon in Mexico. Fun trip with a group from our RV club. We stayed in a hotel at the top. It snowed overnight. Who goes to Mexico for snow???
 

My late sister and I were on a night train in 1967 from Venice to Salzburg that stopped several times at villages.

The strangest stop was somewhere in the middle of the night AND in the middle of nowhere. There was no station, no town, no lights, nothing. Why have we stopped?

Well, it was to pick up a bunch of soldiers (I can't remember if they were Italian or Austrian), who had been on mountain maneuvers for a couple of weeks. They were some kind of elite troops who were good at skiing and shooting and they wore hats that had white feathers on them that was some sort of "badge of honor".

They were stinky, boisterous, and worst of all very "randy" and sure of their "attractiveness" and "sex appeal". We weren't at all sure where they got THAT notion....

After a long long hour of vigorous maidenly protests on our part, one of the conductors caught on to what was happening and moved us to another car where he could keep an eye on us.

I've always been partial to a man in uniform but that was TOO MUCH!
 
Intriguing.

jujube said:
My late sister and I were on a night train in 1967 from Venice to Salzburg that stopped several times at villages.

The strangest stop was somewhere in the middle of the night AND in the middle of nowhere. There was no station, no town, no lights, nothing. Why have we stopped?

Well, it was to pick up a bunch of soldiers (I can't remember if they were Italian or Austrian), who had been on mountain maneuvers for a couple of weeks. They were some kind of elite troops who were good at skiing and shooting and they wore hats that had white feathers on them that was some sort of "badge of honor".
Click to expand...

Hats like this? If so, it seems they might have been the "Alpini"? A specialised mountain infantry unit of the Italian Army. Renowned for their expertise in mountain warfare, skiing, and marksmanship. They usually wear black raven feathers. Officers above the rank of captain wear a white eagle or goose feathers.

hat 01.JPG
jujube said:
They were stinky, boisterous, and worst of all very "randy" and sure of their "attractiveness" and "sex appeal". We weren't at all sure where they got THAT notion....

After a long long hour of vigorous maidenly protests on our part, one of the conductors caught on to what was happening and moved us to another car where he could keep an eye on us.
Click to expand...

Good for the conductors.
 
Magna-Carta said:
Intriguing.



Hats like this? If so, it seems they might have been the "Alpini"? A specialised mountain infantry unit of the Italian Army. Renowned for their expertise in mountain warfare, skiing, and marksmanship. They usually wear black raven feathers. Officers above the rank of captain wear a white eagle or goose feathers.

View attachment 359442


Good for the conductors.
Click to expand...
That could be it! In my mind, the feather was more like a small plume, but that mind has become a little fuzzy in the 57 years since then....LOL.
 
I haven’t taken any long trips. I think my longest has been Harrisburg to Cleveland to go watch the Steelers play the Browns about 25 years ago. We had to change trains in Pittsburgh
 
Hawthorne California, to Los Angeles only it was called a trolley car. Took maybe half an hour. There's a train that does the 4 corners area that I would love to do but the darned oxygen bottles would probably take up a full car on the train. So that's out.
 
In 1961, I took the train from San Francisco Ca to Norfolk Va, via Chicago. It was over 2600 miles and was a peaceful trip until Chicago where we picked up about 40 sailors who had just been released from the Navy Brig. Oh yes, they "livened" things up. They drank everything on the train and brought more booze at every stop on the way down to Norfolk. I had been in the Navy for less than a year and had never seen behavior like that. Now days they would all be thrown out.
 
Most of my train trips were on the Long Island Railroad. Less than 50 miles to NYC. i enjoyed hearing the conductor call out the names of the villages. (SPEE- onk) Then once to DC and back.

More recently I accompanied a friend from Columbia SC to West Palm Florida to see her daughter. It was an overnight trip and we had a compartment where she could plug in her oxygen equipment. Unfortunately the outlet was faulty and in the morning she fell in the dining car for lack of oxygen. She was fine. The trip turned out fine, but Wow.
 
Pecos said:
In 1961, I took the train from San Francisco Ca to Norfolk Va, via Chicago. It was over 2600 miles and was a peaceful trip until Chicago where we picked up about 40 sailors who had just been released from the Navy Brig. Oh yes, they "livened" things up. They drank everything on the train and brought more booze at every stop on the way down to Norfolk. I had been in the Navy for less than a year and had never seen behavior like that. Now days they would all be thrown out.
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Speaking of Norfolk, we lived there for a time in the 60s. (Not Navy) Once we took a train from Richmond VA to Natural Bridge VA which was supposed to take 4 1/2 hours but it was the "milk train" and it took over 8 hours, stopping at every little hamlet and sometimes backing up for who knows what reason.
 
Perth to Adelaide DH said he’d like to do the trip again ….well he’s very welcome but I’d never do the again.
Part way through the trip we arrived in a very small railway town in the middle of nowhere called Cook ..well you most certainly COOK …it was 46 c ~ 114f and we was stopped there for 2 hours ..no air con while trains stopped
🥵🥵🥵…
Then 2 hours stop at 2 am in Kalgoorlie (gold mining outback Wild West town )


How long is the train from Adelaide to Perth? Approx 2700 km by road


43h 10m

The train between Adelaide and Perth takes 43h 10m. The train runs, on average, once a week from Adelaide to Perth. The journey time may be longer on weekends and holidays

Cook
IMG_7133.jpeg
 
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Kadee said:
Perth to Adelaide DH said he’d like to do the trip again ….well he’s very welcome but I’d never do the again.
Part way through the trip we arrived in a very small railway town in the middle of nowhere called Cook ..well you most certainly COOK …it was 46 c ~ 114f and we was stopped there for 2 hours ..no con while trains stopped …
Then 2 hours stop at 2 am in Kalgoorlie (gold mining outback Wild West town )


How long is the train from Adelaide to Perth? Approx 2700 km by road


43h 10m

The train between Adelaide and Perth takes 43h 10m. The train runs, on average, once a week from Adelaide to Perth. The journey time may be longer on weekends and holidays

Cook
View attachment 365148
Click to expand...
That's too long a trip for me. My parents many years ago went from Sydney to Perth, it took 3 days, but they enjoyed it.
 
I spent 3 long days and nights traveling from upstate New York to Reno. The one night I paid for a sleeper car I couldn’t sleep at all because it felt like we were riding right on the tracks. The seats were a level higher and more comfortable.

I was exhausted when I arrived and still felt like I was moving for about 8 hours getting off the train and was dizzy. Now I won’t ride one longer than 8 hours.
 
Not my story, per se, but my Dad's. On the long trip from New York to join his ship in San Diego during WWII, his train, full of sailors, soldiers and probably some Marines, too, stopped in North Platte, Nebraska in the middle of the night.

Expecting nothing more than to get to step off the train in the dark, stretch their legs, water the bushes and have a smoke, he was surprised to find a party going on. Pretty girls and motherly ladies were brewing coffee and making sandwiches. Music was playing on a gramophone and dancing was getting started.

An hour or two of that and it was back on the train for the rest of the trip. If the guys were lucky, they had some addresses in their pockets of girls to write to.

This was North Platte's contribution to the war effort (among others). When the troop trains were known to be coming in, the town woke up, got out of bed and prepared to put on a party. A little food, a lot of coffee and some pretty girls to dance with; just what a lonely serviceman needed.

When we visited North Platte several years ago, I immediately went to the museum to look at the thousands of pictures of the 2 a.m. parties, hoping to find one of my Dad. Alas, no luck, but I did have a nice chat with the very old man who had been on one of those troop trains and had returned to Platte to marry the sweetie that had given him her address and had written to him during the war. Now THAT's a train ride!
 
I'm not too sure, but I think it was from Erzurum to Istanbul by way of Ankara. I had almost no money at the time and was in third class and ill. I remember that I had immediately climbed under the bench seat when I boarded the train and lay on the floor for more than 30 hours, with the legs of passengers hanging down in front of me.
 

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