Climbing to an absolutely dizzying elevation of over sixteen thousand feet, the Qinghai-Tibet railway comfortably holds the record as the highest functional train route on earth.

A closer look

Climbing to an absolutely dizzying elevation of over sixteen thousand feet, the Qinghai-Tibet railway comfortably holds the record as the highest functional train route on earth. The air at this extreme altitude is so incredibly thin and devoid of oxygen that the train passenger cars have to be artificially pumped with supplemental oxygen just to keep the tourists from actively passing out in the dining car. Engineers had to design a deeply complex cooling system to keep the permafrost under the tracks from melting, because otherwise the entire railway would sink into a catastrophic muddy abyss. It is a monumental feat of human stubbornness that we spent immense amounts of capital and resources to run a luxury transport line through an aggressively hostile environment that clearly wants us to die. Nothing says relaxing scenic vacation quite like sipping a hot tea while breathing through an oxygen mask and praying the permanently frozen ground does not violently thaw