Transatlantic Tunnel: A never ending pipe dream

There are many challenges in engineering, some where the boundaries are lack of money and investment, others where technology hasn't caught up enough to make the idea plausible. The challenge to build a tunnel that stretches across the Atlantic ocean has been an idea that has remained a pipe dream since the idea was first thought up. There has not been an idea that has gone passed the conceptual phase due to the sheer cost and time involved to construct them as well as the technology not being available. According to an article at t3.com though the technology has now caught up. [1]

Many ideas have been proposed but there is one, initially developed in the 1960s, that has had more thought put in than any opposing ideas. The distance from London to New York is over 3000 miles and a tunnel was proposed where the train would travel through a vacuum, so there would be no air resistance. It would be propelled using the same technology as maglev lines which use large magnets to lift the train off the track (so there is no friction) and which could propel the train up to speeds of 5000 miles an hour in the vacuum of the tunnel. This would make the journey time under an hour, though it would take nearly 20 minutes to comfortably reach the speed without feeling like your riding a roller coaster.

Bob Idell is quoted as saying “With today’s technology and costs, a fair guesstimate would be that we could probably tunnel a distance of 100m per week on average, at an approximate cost of £50m per km.”[1] To save you time on the maths, that would take roughly 1000 years to complete at a cost of $404.5billion (£250billion). Bob Idell is the chair of the British Tunnelling Society and while these figures are just a guess, it shows this megaproject would take a very long time and an awful lot of money to build.

The show Extreme Engineering on the Discovery Channel explained the proposal in more detail and provided an interactive feature at the link below.

Extreme Engineering: Transatlantic Tunnel Interactive Feature

This is just one idea of many but they all show we are a long way away from constructing a fast route directly across the Atlantic ocean. If it was ever to go ahead, by the time it had been constructed, the aerospace industry may have the ability to carry large amounts of passengers and cargo from Europe to America within an hour, using advanced technology such as Scramjets along with stronger, lighter more cost effective materials. Therefore would it be worth building the transatlantic tunnel at all?

Do you think the idea of a transatlantic tunnel is worth considering or is it worth the time and money it would cost to construct?

Regards,

Mark

There are a lot more advantages and disadvantages to the idea of a transatlantic tunnel, the discussion could go on for hours but I wanted to keep the article as short as I possibly could. Am very interested to hear your ideas and thoughts on the transatlantic tunnel as I think it could be an amazing and useful megastructure.

Sources:
[1] Article at t3 http://www.t3.com/feature/future-tech-transatlantic-tunnel-travel