What is the most remote railroad in the world? By remote, I mean that:

  • this railroad must be disconnected from any other railroad;
  • this railroad must currently have scheduled passenger trains. Heritage/tourism railroads count;
  • "remote" means the longest distance from the closest passenger railway connection;
  • trams, light rails, and horse-pulled railroad carriages (if they still exists) count. Cable cars, trolley buses, etc., do not.

I think the Train of the end of the world near the southern end of South America qualifies quite well. It's not connected to any other trains (the network of Argentina having been largely dismantled) and is in a very remote place. It is also the southernmost railway in the world.

  • That is one remote place, for sure! Nice find. Although I wonder if we take into consideration such heritage / tourist railways then perhaps we could find other very remote ones and the OP indicated in a comment they wanted to exclude them. – chx Mar 26 at 10:13
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    It is a nice find, but the OP specifically excluded heritage tourist railways. The Southern Fuegian is a heritage tourist railway. – DavidSupportsMonica Mar 26 at 22:36
  • I'm debating whether these should be excluded, actually. For a broader spectrum of answers, I'd probably rescind that comment. Plus, these answers make the question more relevant to tourism (I'd very much like to visit some remote passenger railroads :-) – xuq01 Mar 27 at 0:10
  • @xuq01 If you're only including railways with regular passenger service, then by definition it will never be remote... Or are you looking for regular freight railways ? Or places where there is passenger service but only once per month or similar ? – Bregalad Mar 27 at 7:28
  • @Bregalad "Regular" here means "scheduled", so I'm excluding railroads that don't run passenger service except on demand. Heritage railroads usually count as "regular passenger service" too, since they often have tourist trains that run according to a schedule. – xuq01 Mar 27 at 19:10

How do you even prove something like this? Marrakech is 1083.12 km from Zouérat and both are on different railways. In the north, the railways connects to Tunisia but it ends at the Lybian border and it's more than 1400km from Gabes, Tunisia to Sallum, Egypt so the 1083.12 km is the shortest distance. Even the most remote northern railways in Finland and Russia are less than 500km from the next railway. The Panama Canal Railway where I can't figure out what's the closest other station, but there's the Puerto Berrío - Pavas - Medellín line and Puerto Berrío is only 630km away so it's much less.

This of course takes into consideration railway stations you could drive in between. Otherwise, New Zealand will win this, very easily as AFAIK the New Zealand network is a single one with the Interislander ferry and you'd need to cross the 2000km wide Tasman Sea to the next railway in Australia...

Edit: with the question changed and heritage/tourism railroads count, now if we find a single such in New Zealand unconnected then @bregalad 's find is better.

  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interislander "The Interislander operates three roll-on roll-off ferries: Aratere, Kaiarahi and Kaitaki. Aratere is a rail ferry, carrying rail wagons on the lower vehicle deck and road vehicles on the upper vehicle deck. " – chx Mar 27 at 3:55
  • TIL. I stand corrected! – lambshaanxy Mar 27 at 7:57

This is a difficult metric. I’m not sure my answer will be the best, but I was on a regularly scheduled rail line in Baikanur that was very short - maybe 1500m. It was a passenger rail, it was not connected to another rail, and it is extremely difficult to gain passport/visa to visit Baikanur as a tourist. I don’t know if it even has a name but it requires payment and services employees and visitors. As a bonus, it certainly felt like I was further from anywhere I'd ever been before on Earth.

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    wikitravel.org/en/Baikonur#By_train "Baikonur's station, Tyuratam, is on the Moscow-Almaty main line." So it's not particularly far from other rail lines. – chx Mar 28 at 5:03
  • That's what I was worried about - it wasn't attached to anything in 2010, and particularly you have to have a whole world of paperwork to get transferred between connections (and you have to have a driver between them), so I thought that would make it 'remote' ha – Mikey Mar 28 at 15:03

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