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Transatlantic Tunnels – possible?

Imagine boarding a train in London and riding it all the way to New York!

This theoretical rail route would involve a magnetically levitated train travelling from 300 to 5,000 mph (500 to 8,000 km/h) in an airless tunnel floating above the seabed in just under an hour.

No surprisingly, plans for such a tunnel have not progressed beyond the conceptual stage, and no one is actively pursuing such a project. The main barriers to constructing such a tunnel are costs—as much as $12 trillion— and the current scientific and technological limits. Moreover, existing major tunnels, such as the Channel Tunnel and Seikan Tunnel, despite using less expensive technology than proposed for the Transatlantic tunnel, struggle financially. It has been estimated that a Transatlantic Tunnel would be 215 times longer than the longest current tunnel and would cost perhaps 3000 times as much!

Back in 2003, the Discovery Channel’s show Extreme Engineering aired a program entitled “Transatlantic Tunnel” which discusses the proposed tunnel concept in detail. The following video is an adaptation of that documentary:

A 1960s proposal had a 3,100-mile (5,000-km) long near-vacuum tube with vactrains, a theoretical type of maglev train, that could travel at speeds up to 5,000 mph (8,000 km/h). At this speed, the travel time between New York and London would be less than one hour. Another modern variation intended to reduce cost is a submerged tunnel floating about fifteen stories below the ocean surface to avoid ships, bad weather, and high pressure. It would consist of 54,000 prefabricated sections held in place by 100,000 tethering cables. Each section would consist of a layer of foam sandwiched between steel. It too would have reduced air pressure.

An alternative route suggests a tunnel north from Newfoundland over the ice sheet of Greenland and across Iceland to the Faroe Islands and then Scotland. This route is cheaper to build, not least because it can have multiple tunnel heads, but more difficult due to adverse weather conditions in Greenland and the difficulty of maintaining the system near the ice sheet, though lessons learned from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System might mitigate such difficulties.

There are also some issues with what the purpose of such a tunnel would be. If was intended for passengers, then the journey might be too slow to make it competitive with aircraft. If it was intended for freight, then a Bering Strait bridge or tunnel could present fewer problems.

Currently, the longest undersea tunnel is under construction in Norway, Called Atlanterhavstunnelen (Norwegian name) or the Atlantic Ocean tunnel, this is a road tunnel located southwest of Kristiansund in Møre og Romsdal county, and it will be 5 735 meters long and 250 meters deep, one of the deepest undersea tunnels in the world. The construction was started in 2006 and it will be opened in late 2008 or early 2009. The name comes from the fact that it will connect two islands located directly at the open sea, and that it will extend the Atlanterhavsveien road, a popular tourist attraction. The Atlanterhavsveien road goes over small islands with both an open sea view, fjord view, and a view of the mountains.

Source: Wikipedia

Tags: Atlanterhavstunnelen, Norway, Railways, Transatlantic Tunnel