Chinese train direct to London

As direct trains from China to Hamburg have been running since 2013, and the Channel Tunnel has been open for over twenty years, the service to London does not actually involve any new infrastructure.

As the article states, www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38497997 the breaks of gauge at the borders between China and Kazakhstan, and between Belarus and Poland, mean that no through train is possible - containers have to be transhipped at both borders.

Overnight passenger services in and out of the former Soviet Union use low-tech bogie-hanging arrangements to avoid passengers having to change trains in the middle of the night. For the Chia-Madrid freight service, a third break of gauge occurs at the Spanish border. Gauge-changing can be done there on the fly, but it is only used for express passenger services where the time-saving is worth the extra cost of the specialist infrastructure and rolling stock.

A break of gauge in Belfast would not have been a huge problem as most travellers would be interchanging there anyway - about a third of the entire population of NI live in the Belfast metropolitan area, and the rest are probably too widely distributed to make a direct service to Glasgow economic.

However, although at its narrowest point the St Georges Channel is only about 12 miles wide (between the Mull of Kintyre and Rathlin Island), the nearest railway to Belfast on the Eastern side of the Irish Sea is nearer 40 miles away at Stranraer. That would be quite a long tunnel - the alternative of driving a railway across Kintyre would probably be even more costly.

Scotland is probably the closest part of Great Britain to Northern Ireland in both politics and culture (as well as physical distance). One wonders what the Ulster Unionists, whose main raison d'etre is to preserve the union with the UK, will do if the Scottish independence movement ever gets its way and the UK itself ceases to exist.

Agreed, my sloppy drafting; should have said **GB's** Standard gauge.
Re NF's point re the union and Scottish independence; interesting issue, but think you will find the ties have been with England since Poyning's Law of 1494.

Yes, the mods will intervene............