Because it links up an incredibly long and incredibly hostile bit of territory, and essentially hooks the rail networks of Asia with the ones in Europe.

As a result, I can walk to my local train station here in the North of England, and ride a continuous set of trains all the way to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) without ever stepping off the platform. If it weren't for a few destroyed tracks in Cambodia, you could make it to Singapore. That's pretty cool.

It's also the cheapest per-mile transport on earth. Where else can you get a full third of the way around the globe for under $200?

Under $200? That’s pretty incredible. You have to pay three quarters of that to get from Munich to Berlin. That’s with a high speed train, but still — under $200, wow.

Private compartments are more like $400, but yeah, you can get a 3rd class berth for like $180 Moscow to Beijing.

The connectivity of the railway is largely responsible for the string of lights through Russia:

http://nightearth.com/index.php?lat=43.961191&lng=80.683...

If you consider the artificial light emitted at night to be a proxy for density of wealth and economic connectivity, it seems clear that the railway has had a substantial effect.

The railroad also helps with strings of light of a different kind - fiber optics. It connects Europe to Asia through the Internet too.

Significant… it is. It's an important transport link for the Russian economy, and not only it, it even carries some exports from the Far East to Europe. Also, it's a major engineering work, even though mostly unrelated to usual hacker news topics, it should make it at least somehow significant and interesting here.

Awe-inspiring… well, depends. I don't think that a construction and operating of a 10,000 kms long railway line should be dismissed as something trivial and not worth of any attention.

Ah, okay, that puts things in perspective for me.

I think it's maybe because I'm in my early 20s, and grew up near railway tracks that this man-engineered structure's value isn't readily appreciable to me.

You will probably appreciate it more if you know of the terrain that the train runs on. Laying down tracks that work in siberia is far far difficult than doing it on say continental US soil

Because it goes across Siberia, and Siberia is a vast wilderness? I don't know, personally, but I suggest you watch the video and come back and tell us.