While slowly going through the Wikidata SPARQL query examples of last year I ran across this one which draws the shortest railway link between Narvik, Norway, and Singapore. Amazing, really. What was also interesting to find out that still in October 2021, the route went via Sweden. I’m not that inclined in train networks but AFAIK the opening of Luleå-Haparanda track in the beginning of April 2021 changed this route also in Wikidata, eventually.

The news came from a tweet by James Benedict Brown, Associate Professor of Architecture at Umeå University. His travel stories are nice reading. For example, here is a thread on how he and his students traveled in Finland at ground level in summer 2022. Recently, he announced in Mastodon, that early next spring, the target will be Athens. Having the above-mentioned SPARQL query at hand, I asked Wikidata to draw me the shortest route from Umeå to Athens.

The return was 0. Wikidata does not know about a consecutive line of adjacent railway stations between these two cities. How far, in the direction of Athens, does it know these stations then? Inside the borders of Greece , one of the last stations with a clear, labelled indication of a preceding station is Didymoteicho near the Turkish border. From that station on towards Athens, the route quickly stagnates. You can run the query here Click the big Run/Play button. The query takes a few seconds to complete.

(I couldn’t help choosing the title, thank you Bowie.)