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

Before 2022, I once noticed that the Deutsche Bahn app for German trains let me put Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, as destination. The app is good at finding international connections, but it only shows stations that are actually reachable from Germany. After some research, I found it was indeed possible to find a connection from Europe to Pyongyang via Vladivostok once per month. Not anymore though, they removed the Russian train network from their system.

> After all, the definition of the longest possible train journey is “the shortest possible route between the two farthest possible stations.”

I’m trying to think, what would be the most efficient way to compute this? There has to be something better than brute force

I used to travel to Tokyo from New York, regularly.

I would get on the Long Island Railroad, in Huntington, and get off the Narita Express, in Shinagawa.

Strangely enough, I would get off the train, before I got on the train.

Someone really needed to hit the word count with this.