Talk:Transatlantic tunnel

Stability of a submerged tube?
A text I read regarding ordinary high-speed trains said that the high-speed railways need very high stability because there can't be "bumps" at a high speed. Therefore a suspension bridge is not usable at high speed. If one is neccesary it must be travelled at lower speed. What about travelling submerged tubes at above 1000 mph? Maybe one trains causes the tube to move, which might make it very unpleasant for the next train? --BIL (talk) 20:58, 20 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Indeed, such a tunnel or tube is so far beyond current fiscal and engineering capabilities that problems like that seem downright mundane. Presumably such a tube would have integrated mechanisms for active stability, and trains designed specifically to deal with rail movement, rolling of the tunnel due to its weight, change in buoyancy, etc.  Or perhaps solving those are so difficult, a magnetically levitated (MagLev) might be justified.  —EncMstr (talk) 22:30, 20 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Maglev does not solve the problem since the railway is still influenced by a force from the train (Newtons third law). Maglev needs centimeter accuracy for the "railway", and would get serious problems with a submerged tube. If air travel still exists, e.g. year 2200, why is a maglev across the Atlantic justified, having the cost in mind? Isn't air travel better? --BIL (talk) 20:45, 22 July 2008 (UTC)


 * As long as the effect is behind the train, who cares? Presumably the next train is an hour or more behind, long enough for the system to stabilize.
 * I thought the whole point of a high speed (1000+ mph) tube was for it to be in a near-vacuum for energy use advantages.
 * I remember another flavor of proposal (don't remember where, but it was 15–25 years ago) which would mostly evacuate the tube with the train sealing the cross section. With the train at one end, it compresses the air between the station and the train.  As soon as the brakes let go, the air pressure would accelerate the train toward the far end, initially in near-vacuum.  As the train approached the other end, the bits of air ahead of it would compress and slow the train to a stop just as it reached the station, with a nearly full vacuum behind where it just came from—almost a perpetual motion machine.  Just needs a little energy added to replace the thermal losses magnified by Boyle's law.  —EncMstr (talk) 21:00, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Why would you build such en enormously expensive railway and then send only one train per hour trough it? Minimum block distance on current high-speed lines is less than 5 minutes. --85.180.81.165 (talk) 18:58, 7 December 2009 (UTC)


 * The whole point of having the train in a near vacuum is three-fold. First you want to save the energy that would be wasted pushing all that air. Second you can go faster in a vacuum than in normal atmosphere due to reduced friction. Finally, if one were to push all that air column at high speed you would get huge vibrations before the train and a fairly large wake behind it. By removing most of the air we considerably reduce the difficulty of the problem, but introduce a new problem: if the tube were deep underwater the pressure coupled with the suction from the near-vacuum would be tremendous. This is why a tube floating somewhere in the water column is more viable: less pressure and less possibility of rupture due to earthquake. Earthquakes are also an important factor since, over the are which the tube would span, one would assume they would happen fairly frequently. All in all the partial vacuum floating tube is the most promising design, yet still a good way away. Ahugenerd (talk) 18:44, 6 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Given that 1 atm corresponds to about 10m of water, the pressure difference due to using a vacuum is pretty much irrelevant. More significant is the mechanism to seal the tube at the ends, if the ends are not stations, they need to seal in front and behind a fast moving train.  Regarding air travel as better, we still do not have a viable alternative liquid fuel for kerosene jet fuel.  It may be impossible to maintain our existing fleet of airplanes as the world supply of crude oil diminishes.  (Not to mention that air travel at 3000mph is a long way off) --Jaded-view (talk) 21:11, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

The main barriers to constructing such a tunnel are cost—as much as $12 trillion[
If one billion people were to take a trip on this thing, the construction costs alone would be $12,000 each, not counting interest. Of course there are operating expenses as well and some profit. I could see a trip costing as much as $50,000 each way.

The biggest reason this won't be built - terrorism. It would be a bigger target than the WTC. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.100.48.167 (talk) 17:14, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Of course. One small bomb and a guy with some scuba gear could destroy the entire thing. I can see redundancy, though. How fast can you slow down a vactrain? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.178.9.44 (talk) 04:21, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Cost/gain assumptions
The original estimates for the project ranged between 80-175 Billion USD, not in the trillions.

Let's just assume.. (150e9(1+.04)^20)/(2*10*X*1000*365)=20 The above equation assumes the project would cost $150BN, a government loan with 4% interest, 20 years to pay back, trains leave 10 times a day 365 days a year, huge trains carry 1000 passengers and that trains would be running both NY to London and London to NY as there are two tracks. The wholesale price of a ticket would then be $2251 each way. That is actually quite feasible for crossing the the Atlantic in less than an hour. What does a first class ticket run these days? In this example the tunnel is *only* used by a puny 20 thousand passengers per day. How many fly across the Atlantic?

It's pretty likely however that departures would be a lot more frequent. Why wait? With the right automation you could have departures every minute if you really wanted to. The distance between trains would still be roughly 6000km/h*1min=100km! Double the departures means you can half the ticket cost.

The above formula with departures every 10 min results in a wholesale ticket cost of $157. Worth it? Enter the most believable numbers and see what you get!

I realize this is a very rough model which doesn't take upkeep into account. Compared to flying though, upkeep of a vactrain would be close to nill. Which is why airlines and existing magtain makers might lobby to the last breath to prevent this from happening.

In fact, if safety is a concern, you could start with cargo first. This would test automation technologies before human traffic is introduced. No emissions, no friction means overhead per weight would be negligible.

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

This is wrong. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.196.50.130 (talk) 14:12, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

...Why Greenland?
Why's Greenland in the list of destinations? -- I'ḏ ♥  One  21:21, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
 * "A proposed 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 would be cheaper to build because it could have multiple tunnel heads" ? --Golbez (talk) 21:22, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
 * The map is rather inaccurate anyway. The shortest straight-line route between a pair of major cities (ie. London, New York) would loop "north" on that projection, following a great circle - such a route would, in principle, pass a lot closer to Greenland anyway. The shortest line on that map is very different to the shortest line on a real globe. If we're just drawing speculative routes for insanely expensive projects, a route through Julianehaab and Keflavik would only be 9% longer than the shortest route from NYC to LON..
 * The shortest route from New York to Greenland doesn't even pass over Newfoundland, which reinforces my belief that the suggested routes suggest an ignorant optimism about geography as great as their ignorant optimism about engineering. bobrayner (talk) 21:49, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Mid-Atlantic Ridge and other problems
A few thoughts off the top of my head:

The proposed tunnel would have to pass over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is the boundary between two tectonic plates, which are spreading apart at about 2.5 cm per year. So, if the tunnel is to last say 100 years, like most other major tunnels, it will lengthen by over 2 metres at the ridge. This alone is enough, I would say, to eliminate the driven (excavated) tunnel form - you could not safely build in this flexibility over the comparatively short distance of the ridge. But the tethered floating tunnel could work, if the tethers were designed to spread the change in length over a sufficient distance. It would be safer from lava flows and earthquakes, too.

A major set of problems with any physical form of this tunnel is the development and agreement of emergency and maintenance procedures. Agreement would be needed before the design was completed, in fact before a budget cost could be put to financiers, because the emergency facilities would cost a great deal of money, and it is not immediately clear what is needed. How many tunnels, and how do you gain access between them?
 * What happens when (not if) a train breaks down? How do you move it out, how long does it take, and how do you look after the passengers during this lengthy period? Does the number of passengers per train have to be reduced for this emergency condition?
 * What about a fire on a train? Presumably you can take steps to isolate the fire, moving passengers to other cars (if you have left sufficient space), but carry on with the journey. You can't stop the train and have the passengers walk out along the track...
 * What about a bomb, already mentioned above? A small bomb might allow the train to continue, albeit full of dead passengers, but a large one would damage the tunnel itself, as well as killing everybody.
 * How do the emergency services gain access in any of these conditions? How do they work in vacuum? If you aim to feed air back into the tunnel to allow them to work, how long does it take and how do you do it?
 * How many tunnels do you need? The Channel Tunnel has 3, one in each direction and a service tunnel (used also for emergency access), with frequent connections between them. With the trains running in vacuum, can you adopt a dual-track tunnel? There would be no air pressure wave problems.
 * How do you inspect the track and other tunnel fittings? How do you maintain and repair them? Can you do the necessary work safely in a dual track tunnel, with one track only running? Can you do the work in vacuum?

Agreement on these matters would take many years, and it is Murphy's law that the emergency services on the two sides of the Atlantic would not agree with each other.

Oh, one other point. How do the trains transition from vacuum to normal air? At the stations, you might be able to provide the transition for the passengers only, leaving the trains in vacuum, but all the trains will need to be taken out of service for maintenance and repair, so air locks would be needed.

None of this really matters, of course, because the scheme is obviously hopelessly non-viable financially. Sorry to be a wet blanket. Patche99z (talk) 14:39, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I think it would be very viable financially; can you imagine the benefits from being able to go from New York to London and back in a single day? As for some of the other questions: Presumably there'd be tow trains to pull a foundering train to a station, might take a while. I'd figure two or three tunnels, though they could start with one. And as for 'transitioning from vacuum to normal air', why can't the entire train take an airlock at the end? Once it's reached just before the station, have the whole train enter an airlock. --Golbez (talk) 14:52, 10 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your comments, but I think we must agree to disagree on financial viability. So far as I can see from the references in the article, no multi-discipline expert study has been done, so the costs must be pure guesses - hence opinions on viability are guesses too. My guess is based on the bits and pieces I know about other large engineering projects, and I stick by it. But I agree with you on the problem of airlocks - this is a comparatively minor matter. My rather grumpy bullet points above are illustrating an area of expertise (not mine) that is needed before capital costs can be assessed. Then passenger capacity must be assessed, with passenger forecasts, leading to revenue projections and running costs. All I see in the references so far are superficial engineering ideas for the tunnel and type of train. Well, of course, many schemes start as pie-in-the-sky ideas, and gradually progress to actuality. But this one will not come in my lifetime, nor yours (however old you are!) Patche99z (talk) 13:30, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Seafloor spreading
It's odd that this article doesn't mention the plate tectonics issues due to the need of crossing from Eurasian Plate to North American Plate. That is an active tectonic place (earthquakes, submarine vulcans...), not somehwere you'd like to build a train railway on the sea floor. Moreover, even with floating designs seafloor spreading would likely bring issues due to the need to enlarge the floating tunnel a few centimeters each year. Platonides (talk) 14:00, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Length
What would the minimum length of a direct tunnel between NY and London (or Lisbon?) be? And what would the minimum length of the route Newfoundland-Greenland-Iceland-Faroe Islands be? --134.176.204.29 (talk) 00:34, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The great circle from NYC to Lisbon is 5430km, which is a bit longer. bobrayner (talk) 01:32, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

History/early interest
It seems that the idea of a transatlantic tunnel goes back at least as far as 1867. See "Tunnel Under the Atlantic" on page 45 of this book: https://books.google.com/books?id=lN0aAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45#v=onepage&q&f=false — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.1.101.59 (talk) 20:24, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

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Cultural Reference
Donald Fagan in his son I.G.Y. references an undersea rail system where an imaginary transport system, designed in the late 1950's could take a person from "New York to Paris" "in ninety minutes." Hopeglory000 (talk) 19:33, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Donald Fagan's song I.G.Y. Hopeglory000 (talk) 19:37, 1 October 2021 (UTC)