Utah to Rome by train
During a recent long holiday trip to Rome, my wife and I started wondering how the trip could happen by train. I feel although air travel is much faster, it is rather inconvenient and obtrusive when compared to trains. It's an opinion, I won't try to defend it, if you agree or not, that's okay. The idea took me to do some research about the feasibility and possible cost in time and money of such endeavor.
The distance between Salt Lake City, Utah’s capital, and Rome is 9,300 kilometers if we could go in a straight line between the cities. Sadly, trains can’t travel in a straight line as they need to account for differences in terrain, and more importantly in this case, because of the Atlantic Ocean separating the 2 continents.
A possible, all-land, route could be U.S., Canada, Alaska, Russia, then Europe. This is still all hypothetical because there is no land connection between Alaska – Russia but let us assume there is a Bering Strait tunnel for the purpose of this post. The distance, accounting for route deviations, would go to north of 18,000 kilometers.
Modern high-speed trains reach an average of 250-300 km/h. Taking slowdowns and stops, let us average the speed to 280 km/h. This would only be possible in Europe as the U.S does not have a sophisticated and, to be honest, usable, railway network. For simplicity's sake, I’ll use 280 km/h as base speed and revisit that later to account for U.S travel. At this speed over that distance, travel time would be little over 64 hours, or over 2 days: