Circling the World by Rail: The Geometry of Distance
I only went around the world once, but it took five train trips to do it.
1997 – The Trans-Siberian Railway: Moscow to Beijing
In 1997, my dad, brother, and I boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway, the route that cuts through Mongolia to China instead of heading east to Vladivostok. It was a different era — no smartphones, no Wi-Fi, no way to contact anyone except by postcard or accident. It was the last capture of an old-fashioned time dilation — being truly alone with your thoughts, a notebook, and a Sony Walkman with pirated Russian tapes.
The journey took seven days and 9,001 kilometers across Russia. Sharing a compartment that small with family at an age where everyone has opinions was an exercise in diplomacy and patience. But we made it work, often with spectacular results.
In Siberia, the train stopped in the middle of an uncontrolled forest fire. The smoke seeped in through the vents, and outside the flames were close enough to feel. We were surrounded — the world had turned orange. No panic, no drama — just silence. Russians don’t show fear unless it’s useful.
Crossing into Mongolia, the landscape flattened into the Gobi Desert — bare, open, and infinite. The sand formed shapes that looked like giant marshmallows melting in the sun. Kids waved from the tracks; sometimes they threw bottles. Camels stood outside the grimy restaurant car window. It was the most remote I’ve ever been — the coordinates of total loneliness.
When we entered China, everything changed. Beijing in the late ’90s was bicycles, coal smoke, and momentum. You could still find quiet alleys that hadn’t changed in centuries. Twenty years later, those rivers of bicycles became torrents of e-bikes.
2000 – Canada: Halifax to Vancouver
Three years later, I crossed Canada from Halifax to Vancouver by rail. For a country this young and underpopulated, the sheer distance feels like an act of faith. It’s one long, slow-motion sentence of land — Quebec’s rivers, Ontario’s lakes, the Prairies’ flat truth, and the Rockies, which stand like a punctuation mark before the Pacific.
No fires this time, just the quiet realization that most of Canada is trees, water, and rock, held together by the same rails that built it.
2003 – USA: New York to San Francisco
In 2003, I rode from New York to San Francisco, two years after 9/11. At the World Trade Center site, people stood behind fencing, staring, whispering, not sure whether to grieve or take photos.
Times Square felt less like a place than a broadcast — noise, neon, and insomnia. Crossing Central Park, I realized that New York doesn’t sleep because it can’t.
The American rail system isn’t built for speed. It’s slow, rough, and often late. But that’s its charm. The ride across the Appalachians, the Great Plains, and the Sierra Nevada is a front-row seat to the size and contradiction of the country. You pass rusting steel towns, desert towns, thriving cities, and places that have simply given up.
In Europe and Asia, high-speed trains hit 300 km/h and run smoother than governments. In North America, rail is nostalgia. It’s for people who like to take the long way — and don’t mind a stranger buying them coffee in the dining car.
2006 – China to North Korea
In 2006, I took the train from China into North Korea and spent a week inside what is still the world’s only dynastic, family-run communist dictatorship. The border crossing was slow, serious, and tense. Guards checked everything.
Each of us had a government minder and a van. Every minute of every day was accounted for. But cracks appeared — moments of improvisation: dancing with North Koreans, laughing, taking a photo when we shouldn’t have. All technically offenses.
It was both terrifying and enlightening. You don’t come back with souvenirs — you come back with perspective.
2009 – Moscow to London
The last leg came in 2009: Moscow to London, through Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, France, and England. This was less about endurance and more about precision — the European trains were fast, clean, and proud of it.
In Berlin, I saw the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, and the line where history literally changed tracks. In Paris, I bought a baguette and stared at that tower, realizing that some clichés survive because they earn it.
In Germany, the trains ran like clockwork. In France, the TGV was a blur at 300 km/h. Crossing the Channel Tunnel — “Le Ditch,” as the French joke — I sat beneath thirty kilometers of seawater, wondering if civilization was always just one engineering project away from hubris.
When I reached London, the circle was complete — not just geographically, but in perspective. My life had patience again. The days became stories, and time, when given room, showed me what it looks like when it slows down enough to reveal its own face.
Reflections
From Siberia’s fire to North Korea’s silence, from the Rockies to the Channel Tunnel, each trip showed me how the world fits together when you stop rushing through it.
Planes skip the in-between. Trains teach you to notice it. (There's a Country song, call "Fly-Over States" that epitomizes this.)
My notebooks filled with faces, accents, and toasts — the kind that used to happen between strangers before the screens came out. It’s hard to drink vodka with a stranger now; everyone’s too busy scrolling so they get left alone.
Traveling by rail isn’t about getting somewhere. It’s about sequence — watching one world turn into another, slowly enough to understand it.
Five trips. One loop around the planet.
It took twelve years and about 40,000 miles — but mostly, it took time.
And that’s the only ticket you can’t buy twice.
My book "Ties That Bind" is available HERE