8 interesting facts about trains and railways in the world

The Vatican has the smallest railroad in the world. The so-called “Papa Express” was once a hidden railway connecting the Vatican with Rome. It was opened in 1934. It is located behind St. Peter’s Basilica. It is 1.3 kilometers long. The line used to drive the “Holy Father”, while today it is used to transport all goods from Italy to the Vatican. The train has been open to tourists since September 2015. A full-day train ticket is 16 euros and includes entrance to the Gardens of Rome and the Vatican Museums. After the train station in the Vatican, the train continues over the viaduct on the Roman side of the walls. The journey continues through picturesque villages and meadows in Italy, past Lake Albano near Castel Gandolfo with beautiful gardens open to visitors.
The most luxurious train in Russia is called the “Golden Eagle” or the Trans-Siberian Express train. Most of the population of Russia travels by this train. Traveling with the Golden Eagle is a type of travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway that connects Moscow and Vladivostok. The price of traveling with this luxury train is around 20,000 euros. The journey takes 7 days while the ride passes through 150 cities / train stations in Russia. The train arrives at each station on time and there are no delays recorded. The trip is perfectly organized. The seats in the train are perfectly marked while the interior of the train is very clean. Clean bed linen is distributed daily in the sleeping car. All passengers have one or two travel assistants who help passengers to make the trip unforgettable, comfortable and enjoyable.
The Trans-Siberian Railway is 9288 kilometers long. The journey passes through 8 time zones, 11 cities in Russia, 9 rivers and one of the largest lakes in the world (Lake Baikal or the Blue Siberian Eye or a rich lake or “baikul” in the Tatar language). The lowest point on the trip is at the Amur Bay on the Pacific coast, while the highest point is 1040 meters high at the Jablonovya mountain pass near Turguti, 6110 kilometers from Moscow. The longest tunnel is used only for freight traffic and is 7 kilometers long. The longest tunnel for passenger traffic is about 2 kilometers long. It’s called the Tarmachuk Tunnel. The coldest location through which the railway passes is between Mogoche (at 6906 kilometers) and Skovorodina (at 7306 kilometers). The winter temperature here is -62 ° C.
4.The largest model railway in the world is located in the German city of Hamburg. It’s called the Miniature Wunderland. Here are the trains and wagons and the largest model of the airport. The model includes as many as 40 planes, 40,000 lights, 10,000 trees and 500 cars. “Miniature Wunderland” was opened in 2001. It has since attracted a large number of tourists from all over the world. It is estimated that this landmark is visited by more than a million people a year. 500,000 hours of work and 3.5 million euros were invested in Miniatur Wunderland. The construction of the railway model took six years. It covers an area of 1300 square meters. 900 active trains are running through this area. There are also 900 signaling devices, 2,200 switches, 200,000 figures, 3,500 buildings and bridges, 5,000 cars and over 200,000 pieces of miniature trees. The Hamburg attraction is open to visitors every day. The ticket price is 12 euros for adults and 6 euros for children up to 16 years old.

Backo Mini Express is among the first Museums in the world dedicated to railways. Backo Mini Express is located in Zagreb on an area of 350 square meters of indoor space. It is one of the largest railway models in Southeast Europe and the fifth largest in Europe. The permanent exhibition has about 140 trains in motion on 1500 meters of tracks. The museum gives a reduced reality in a ratio of 1:87. Through the story of the railway, one can see a wider and more detailed life in the city of Zagreb. The owner is Mr. Antun Urbić Backo. The Train Museum is located at Gundulićeva 4 in Zagreb (Croatia).
The largest model railway in the world (Nortlandz) was created by Bruce Zakanin. The model occupies 64,750 square meters. It has a length of 15,240 meters and enough timber to build 42 houses. It is easy to call Northland a novelty or a convenient place to watch trains, but without a personal departure, it is difficult to say that it is much more than that.
Northlandz is a collection of stories in the form of miniature figurines. It’s humor, whim and charm. These are years of work and love. As you move from room to room (there are dozens of them), you realize with awe that Northlands is a manifested vision of one man. You probably haven’t even heard of this model, which only speaks of the injustice towards the effort, but that will change. With the “Separately Together” project run by Sony, artists, engineers and innovative cameras with a QX100 lens will be brought together to capture the world of the Northlands in a way never seen before. which come to life and have a reciprocal relationship – engineers create tools that artists use. Just as the engineers of Sony’s QX100 cameras have an impossible dream – to separate the cameras from the phone – so Bruce had an impossible dream.
A train in China passes through a residential building thus setting new standards in railways, traffic and architecture. Architects and planners in the Chinese city of Chungking have found a new way to make room for a basic driving route – by building a railroad through a residential building. The train passes through a nineteen-story building, but that’s not the strangest thing of all. In this unusual building, there is a station, so that tenants can get on the train directly from their apartment. Chungking is located in the southeast of China. City planners obviously had to resort to this unusual solution given the growing population of Chinese cities. Namely, Chunking is a growing metropolis that has almost 50 million inhabitants with the surrounding areas. For that reason, it has the status of a province.

In 2019, the Chinese promoted the fastest train in the world (which should be developed only by Chinese). It is the “Shanghai maglev” that should develop a speed of 600 kilometers per hour. The first passengers should ride in 2021. This project is currently being tested. The future of railway traffic is a train with magnetic levitation technology marked “maglev”, the Chinese believe. It does not walk on rails, but floats on a magnetic field above the track on which it moves. There is already a super-fast maglev train operating between Shangai airport and city. This is the first ever produced “maglev” train developed with BBO and a Siemens German’s companies. Has very little resistance and, thanks to powerful electric motors, it can develop incredible speed. The train currently reaches a top speed of 431 kilometers per hour, and a distance of 30 kilometers is covered in seven minutes.
But the upcoming new project with the fastest train in the world is quite expensive. It will cost $ 1.2 billion. From the beginning, the project was operating at a loss. But the Chinese are not giving up. The first passengers will ride in this train in 2021.
It is not yet known on which route the hyperfast train will run. Of course, the Chinese would most like the Shanghai-Beijing line, which would be connected by this train faster than by plane. Traveling by plane, including waiting at the airport, takes about four and a half hours, and this superfast train would take one hour less. The biggest obstacle remains the extremely high cost of infrastructure.