Extreme and Unusual Journeys

[Kyng]

We have a thread about Unusual towns and cities, for sharing and discussing the oddities of our urban settlements. However, sometimes it's not just the cities themselves that are odd - but the journeys between them . Here's a thread for discussing roads, railways and other journeys that are extreme or unusual in some way - whether it's because they're so long, so short, so expensive, so dangerous, or anything else you can think of .

I'll start with the following video, about the longest train services in the world:



This lists some of the longest train services in each country; however, I'll just summarise the longest of all:

• The third-longest train service is the six-day, 5,582-mile trip from Moscow to Beijing (which includes a 4-hour stop to change the track gauge of the carriages themselves );
  
• Slightly longer is the 144-hour trip from Moscow to Vladivostok, which runs for 5,772 miles.
  
• However, the longest passenger train service of all runs from Pyongyang to Moscow. This consists of a sleeper car which first travels from Pyongyang to Vladivostok, then gets coupled to the aforementioned Moscow-to-Vladivostok train when it makes its return journey. This service runs for 6,380 miles - and lasts for 206 hours.
  
• Still, if we take into account freight trains as well... there are some even longer ones . The longest of all is the 7,500-mile service from Yiwu (in China) to London (through the Channel Tunnel) - and this takes 18 days, or 432 hours .

So, does anybody know of any more extreme or unusual journeys?

[Kyng]

This one certainly qualifies as 'unusual' . In 2013, an electromagnet took a 3,200-mile boat trip from Broomhaven (Long Island, NY) to Fermilab (Batavia, IL), all the way around the East Coast . There were two things that made this journey so difficult:

1. The electromagnet was 50ft wide, and weighed 17 tonnes. It wouldn't fit through many bridges and tunnels .
   
2. The inner circuitry of the electromagnet was very fragile - and even slight disturbances could ruin it (thus rendering the entire trip pointless).

Fortunately, the move was carried out successfully, over the course of 35 days. If you want to see how it was done, watch this video:



The move cost around $3 million - but that's still way cheaper than the $30 million that it would have cost to build a new electromagnet at the destination!