August 28, 2006 - As most of my friends already know, I'm really into infrastructure and engineering projects. So while surfing the Discovery Channel website today, I came across this really really cool proposal to construct a tunnel across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York City all the way to London!! Named the "Transatlantic Tunnel Project", the tunnel will be raised above the ocean floor (so technically it's more like a tube in the Atlantic than a tunnel, since tunnels are dug out from beneath the ocean floor) and will stretch over 5000 km long. The tube will be a vacuum tube, so that mag-lev (magnetic levitation) trains could travel through the tube without air resistance and friction at up to 5000 mph (8000 km/h) faster than a bullet fired from a gun. Travelling time between NYC and London would be reduced to just an hour!! (by comparison, it takes more than an hour to go from downtown Toronto to suburban Markham!) So you could technically have dinner in New York, take the train and eat dessert in London!
The idea sounds awesome though I doubt I will actually get to see it in my lifetime (costs estimates are at around 12 trillion dollars!). However, the idea of vaccum tube trains is not exactly new. As far back as the 1910s, there have been proposals to build transcontinental vacuum tubes across the US to help reduce travelling time (i.e. Boston-NYC in 10 minutes, NYC-Los Angeles in less than an hour). Today, many cities already have mag-lev trains (the first line opened in Shanghai) - so vacuum tube trains may not be that far off, provided that the huge construction costs are covered somehow...
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