trans-mongolian trans-portation diagram

or: how to get from St. Petersburg to Seoul in (at least) 42 different ways.

Rough diagram of travel possibilities for a trip I took in the summer of 2010 going from St. Petersburg to Seoul, via train/ferry.

Each solid block of color represents a train or ferry going between two destinations. Each train/ferry is an actual train, and its position is graphed exactly down to the minute. Because of my time schedule, certain paths were very flexible -- for example, there were many trains going from St. Petersburg to Moscow, while there was only one train going from Ulaanbataar to Beijing every week. Obviously, there were many more trains than the ones graphed; the trains I selected to take were usually ones that would enable me to spend as much time in a city as possible (while, of course, enjoying the train ride itself.)

Each day is represented by 120 pixels, with each pixel representing 12 minutes. Times are all (deliberately) converted into local time (the trip crossed over 8 time zones), so this results in slightly skewed representations of time. For the most part, a block of color is a good representation of how long a train is, which parts of the day it starts and ends on, and its proportional relationship to the 'wandering time' spent in each city.

This graph was made for the sole purpose of enabling a degree of flexibility, so that I would have a real freedom to travel as I desired to, within the given constraints of time and space. I made this diagram just a few hours before I left on a plane to Dusseldorf (going to St. Petersburg), and was genuinely surprised at how helpful a tool it became during travel, and enabled me not only to choose my travel plans on a whim, but also making it easy to visualize times and their proportions in relation to the day of the week, time of day, and so on.

To view the full image, click here.