Slashdot Mirror
Alaska To Siberia... By Rail?
SlushDot writes:This article describes an unbelievably ambitious project that would make the "the chunnel", the underwater tunnel connecting England and France, look like a high school science project. Russia wants to build a tunnel from Eastern Siberia to Western Alaska, right under the Bering Sea. At a projected cost of 1.7x10^12 Russian Rubles (That's 4x10^10 GBP or $6x10^10 USD), I'm not sure where Russia will get this money, but wouldn't it be fun to ultimately travel from Tierra del Fuego to Johannesburg by train?"
It's cold up there -- you could get a frost pist real easy like...
$60 billion US.
... put all that money into an investing account, then use the interest to build big ferries, drive all the trains onto those ferries, and shuttle everything back and forth.
Im looking for reasons to make it worth the 60 billion dollars.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
Hence more proof that the "Soviet Union collapse" was a farce... The USSR collapsed, but its rulers didn't, and this is one more step the world will soon find out... Whaddya think they gonna build a railroad to ship sardines from USSR to the US?
Wasn't the England-France train called the Shuttle, not the Chunnel ?
this would have a drastic impact on the world's view of russia, and may be worth that price in publicity alone.
:-)
remember that labor is dirt cheap for russia, so the dollar figure is a bit misleading. (that's how muc the labor it "worth", but not how much it costs) they'll part with much less cash in that, paying for raw materials and equipment, but equipment will also be made russian so that's cheap as well.
not much of a touristy idea tho (unless you like the coal trains of west virginia!
http://kered.org
Yeah, its a neat idea, and perhaps it could pave the way for things like space elevators and the like, but, is it REALLY cost effective to build a tunnel of that size and scale and length -- in such a remote place?
I'd think that the cost of shipping things/people to Alaska and Russia to get them somewhere they wanted to go (Say... Moscow, or China, or whatnot) would outweigh the cost of airplanes or large ships.
This is a cool idea, but the locale doesn't have the traffic to support it.
Poor little no puppy toe!
http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385
C'mon... it's just a quick way to start shipping their armored divisions over... ;-)
-- "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -A.Einstein
Doesn't a fleet of Jumbo-Jets cost less?
If you crash a plane, you make another.
If your cross-sea rail collapses, that's 10^Hells' worth of loss.
-=-
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
how does russia plan to pay for all of this? last time i checked, they were up to their necks in debt with a struggling economy to boot.
The main reason the chunnel is needed in the first place is that a lot of people want to go back and forth between the UK and France. Siberia and Alaska are both some of the most unpopulated, barren, desolate places on earth. Who the hell would use the thing? I don't even think the space shuttle costs $60 billion. This is quite possible the most vaporous post I've ever seen on slashdot. How the hell is it "news for nerds"?
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Unfortunately, the death of communism hasn't done much to improve Russia's economy; there's still a lot of hungry people that must be fed, buildings that must be repaired, and pollution that must be removed (the Communists weren't too good about picking up after themselves). $60 billion would go a long way to repairing Russia's economy and fighting the rampant corruption there.
Engineering marvels and feats of science are cool and all, but I think it would be foolish to forget that technology is designed to serve the people, not enslave them. For a country as impoverished as Russia, the first order of business should be to help the many poor and/or depressed families get back on their feet.
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.
A British billion is a million million, not a thousand million, or so I'm told. $60 billion dollars isn't that much these days, $60 trillion sounds like a much more impressive figure for an impressive project.
And it isn't the salmon in the north pacific.
It seems to me that this project will probably be funded by U.S. dollars and not Russian rubles. Although russia may be the face behind the operation, I'll bet that there are either plenty of U.S. investors involved, or the U.S. Federal Gov. will be willing to back the project with good-old taxpayers dollars (we weren't gonna use it anyhow...)
Either way, I hope the project manages to inject decent cashflow into the Commonwealth of Independent State's economy, God knows they need it.
The map in the article shows Fairbanks to the East of the US/Canadian Border. I know that Alaska is remote, but I think we would miss that much of it if the Canadians start redrawing maps to their own advantage! On a different note, the article mentions a tunnel to the Sakhalin (sp?) Islands, enthusiastically funded by Japan. In the 20 year time frame for the Bearing Strait tunnel, extending a tunnel all the way to the Japanese Mainland (Nippon) doesn't seem too far fetched. Forget Tierra Del Fuego to Johanesburg, try New York to Tokyo! -no sig is good sig
I'm a lawyer with excellent karma. Something's gotta be wrong.
First, let me mention that The Times should stick to buying maps, not drawing their own. Fairbanks is in Alaska, folks, not the Yukon...and Prince George is not ~300 miles inland.
That said, Alaskans (at least the environmental ones) will not be keen to have a road, or even a rail, from Nome to Fairbanks. Alaska includes an immense amount of undeveloped and inaccessible land, and even pro-oil folk want to see this continue.
Reading between the lines, the real benefit wouldn't be to tunnel cars, but trains. I can't imagine lots of immediate tourism, but trade would certainly develop.
The thing is, someone needs to do some analysis: is this really better than shipping by sea or air freight? (Anchorage is already one of the world's busiest cargo airports.)
The bottom line, as usual, is money. The Alaskan Oil Pipeline was an incredible feat of engineering, but was built for money. Who's going to see the money in a Trans-Bering tunnel?
Isn't this a fairly active volcanic area? I know I wouldn't want to be in the middle of the 23 mile stretch when a little one hits, let alone the big one.
I don't ever see this getting off the ground (or under it).
I used to live in Alaska. I moved there just before the pipeline went in. I remember what *that* took. This is a much bigger project with some bigger obsticles.
First - They are going to have to deal with the environmentalists. That alone is going to be a big task. When the pipeline was built, the various pro-environment groups were not nearly as strong as today. Getting them to even remotely buy-off on this is going to be next to impossible, if not totally impossible.
Second- They are going to have to figure out a way to make this thing work in tempitures that range from 60 below zero f to +90f in the summer. The climate is not hospitable to things that have moving parts or that can get buried.
Third - Much of the land is covered in permafrost. In order to build anything on it that will last, you have to dig to bedrock and fill with some other material. (Permafrost melts into a mud/jello-like substance in the summer. Outside Fairbanks you can see roofs of sunken houses that were built on it by foolish settlers.)
Fourth - There is absolutly NO economic reason to build the thing in the first place. Who is going to use it? The population density in Alaska and Siberia is very close to empty. There are not many people there. For the amount of track you would have to lay for so few people, what is the point?
Fifth - Good luck trying to get the governments of the US, Russia and Canada to agree on any of the details. I expect the wrangling by them, as well as the unions and other people who would want a peice of this to eat up 60 billion just amongst themselves. And that is before any track is laid.
Just because you can do a thing, does not mean you should.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Telecom cables are flexible, trains dont usually like it when their tracks start to change shape.
What would you do with a derailed train load of passengers at the bottom of the Bering Strait after an earthquake?
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
Considering they'd ever do this and get the trains running etc. It wouldn't do much good for transportation of people.
Sure, in most of the east you can ride a train just about anywhere. But when people get to alaska, they're going to have to get on a plane because of the lack of any popular or intricate american train system.
I mean, who *wouldn't* want to ride a train to Siberia?
:-)
Actually, thinking a bit more, it may be a good idea. Rail transport is surely cheaper than freighter. And there are a pile of Chinese folk just starting to get their shit together to become the biggest consumer market in the world. Might be nice to transport stuff to them cheaply.
On the other hand, I don't recall there being many rail lines from North America to South America, or a (productively working) rail line from Europe to India, the second-largest mass o' peeples. Or perhaps our media doesn't like reporting on it.
Except for the Aussies, the major landmasses would all be interconnected by road/rail. That'd be interesting. And what with global warming and all, maybe Siberia ain't such a bad spot to visit after all.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Weird, I had that same idea when I was 10 years or so... then I started calculating how long the tunnel would have to be. I remember thinking this is way too long for a tunnel and forgot about it again.
Anyway, isn't there seismological activity in this area ?
I find it hard to believe that Russia can come up with the capital to finance the project by themselves, since they can't even afford to keep MIR in the sky at a very small fraction of that cost. However, if this is built, this railway line should be immensely profitable! I imagine that Russia will need and seek outside investors to help fund this.
Possible profit scenarios that I can see are:
1 Russia get a new "port" - I imagine that the amount of cargo coming across wil be VAST (spped cost benefits of rail vs shipping)
2 Russia's recently discovered new petroleum fields have had trouble exporting their product. I know that Russia hasn't been able to build their pipeline down to the Mediteranian Sea due to the fighting in the intervening countries. A pipeline thru the tunnel will benefit both Russia and the USA - they have oil, we NEED oil and want to be less dependent on mideast oil.
3 Tourism - drive your own car/RV in RUSSIA!
Technologically this shouldn't be anymore difficult that the Chunnel in terms of digging the tunnel itself, although I imagine that joining the two sides will be a bitch!! (unless they can receive GPS signals underground)
US security protest should be nill - very easy to defend and Rusia can profit if we want to send large amounts of troops thru the tunnel to the mid east areas
I dunno - are there any serious objections to building the tunnel that I haven't though of? - (I imagin that isolationist idiots like Jesse Helms will raise protests.)
..........FULL STOP.
These costs have a way of rising. Also, Alaska has a way of rising... and falling... and swaying side-to-side. I'm referring to the tremendous quake that struck the area... in the 1960s was it? What would that have done to a tunnel?
Build the connecting lines, run some good, sturdy, Ice-breaker ferries for a while. See if they turn a profit, then get back to us. OK?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If we had this, how many more tunnels would you need to be able to travel to any country by rail? I wonder how long it would take to go from London to New York by rail across Eurasia and North America, that would be one heck of a journey.
Matthew Vanecek For 93 million miles, there is nothing between the sun and my shadow except me. I'm always getting i
-US needs oil
-Alaska doesn't supply nearly enough oil to US
-Russia has lots o' oil and no way to ship it
Sooo...
I imagine that they're thinking that they can hook their pieline in our ALREADY BUILT pipeline. Nice neat solution. The USA can slow down drilling in Alaska (environmentalists (me) say Yeah!)
..........FULL STOP.
Yep, it's true. Here's one link I know of which explains this phenomenon: A concise reference to the Metric System (SI)
--
All these fabulous projects coming out of the collapsed Soviet Union will bear no fruit. Remember the super-fast chip technology that was supposed to conquer the market? Where are the chips? The Mir space station couldn't be maintained, and they're going to build this ludicrous tunnel? I know the Russians have alot of pride, but come on...Reality Check!
Blar.
It actually makes some sense.. For non-timing-sensitive cargo -- i.e. not people -- a train is damn efficent. And if you run it through Russia for a small cost, they'll make money on the market going between the US and Asia.
Gentoo Sucks
*cough* No, really, the TVA system is pretty cool. It's made lots of nice lakes, and frankly I don't give a damn about the communities that got displaced. Plus it doesn't really flood in TN anymore.
have we
i want to go back to the 60's where things like putting a man on the moon and supersonic air travel were done just because it was cool to do
i wnat to live in a time where things are done because someone dreams, and whocares if it doesnt make money
i agree with a return in investment, but still alot more plans shoujld leave paper, and reach reality.
dream big, build big, and ill love you for it
Maybe after this you CAN ride a bus to China?
The rail-line, combined with the fact that Russia will be releasing about 1/3rd of it's ENTIRE PRISON POPULTION this year, makes for a very interesting story. :)
Sell the rights to the Major Motion Picture. That's probably what they're planning on to pay back the 60 gigadollars.
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
Everybody so far has it backwards. Water transport is the cheapest, followed by rail, road and air. With water you need no track, you can go in a (pretty much) straight line and the world is about 7/8 covered with water so most land is fairly reachable.
The ability to ship everything from oil, cars, tourists, grain, electronics etc by rail would be extremely useful. The Russians could pay for this by opening up the tunnel to other nations. Shipping bulk goods by sea is certainly not cheap, and competition has always done wonders to keep prices in check.
The other thing to keep in mind is that this would create a gateway from China to the US. There is no question that China will be soon, if not already, be the worlds largest market. The Russians don't have to particulary use this themselves, they just make it available to others. It's kind of like a skycraper, the costs are astronomical, yet it is fairly profitable to build them.
On the environmental issues, I'm not sure how they plan to tackle those. If they can use electric trains (becoming more common, and the Japanase might supply these to get in on the action), than most environmental concerns could be fairly easily averted. The largest practical issue is not one of building the thing. The Chunnel from England to France proved that. It's the unstable nature of the ground itself, as other /.'s have already pointed out. Someone show me how they can deal with that, and I say this can be done.
The Russians have great ideas. Just this past summer at the World Expo in Hannover they showcased models for a jet sea-rescue plane, a GIGANTIC underwater research vessel for the arctic regions (dwarfs current nuclear subs), and many more things. The ideas are there, sure. Lots of them.
But the money isn't. This is 60 billion dollars we're talking about. For something that has little economic merit, and certainly wouldn't repay itself anytime soon. We're talking about a country in a very large economic ditch. All this stuff is "vaporware."
Uhh, that looks OK. We haven't seen that number yet.
If anyone has a good source for decent maps on the Internet, please share. :-) I find MapQuest sucks ... case in point I can't post a link to their map of the Alaska region.
From a department of the Alaska state government, here's the best map of the region I've found so far. A larger (and fuzzy!) map is here.
What if there is a plan to build this to transport all of the people from the US to Russia because there is imminent doom of the entire North American continent being covered in ice in a few short years?
.
this would be a good idea, but I thought I was being original.
It could be done cheaply, of course. First of all, for the actual tunnel under the Bering Strait, you could use a floating bridge - after all, tunnels were used on the British Channel only so they wouldn't block shipping, but there is very little shipping on the North Pole. (Seattle has two very beautiful floating bridges that were built at a remarkably low cost - though they are about 4 km each, since each segment supports itself and can be towed in, I don't think 60 km should be too bad.) Secondly, the vast majority of such a rail network is already built - there's a rail line going straight up the West Coast into Alaska, and rail already goes through Alaska. All these lines are very old and would need to be renovated, but it should be cheaper than building new lines.
Up in Alaska and Siberia, you'd need to cover the tracks somehow to prevent snow from clogging the lines - after all, trains might not be frequent enough to justify sweeping.
The train would clearly not be used for shipping, as massive barges already go between Seattle and San Francisco and Asian ports like Tokyo and Tianjin quite frequently. And though trains might be attractive for shipping between the West Coast and Europe, there's basically no trade going on now. Also, no one in particular wants to send things from the West Coast to Africa, and the little trade that does go on is in diamonds and oil, which are sent by pipelines and airplanes now anyways.
So what would it be useful for? Well, if there were a million passengers a year (random number), and the project was financed for 50 years (also arbitrary), a ticket on the $60,000,000,000 system would cost $1200. Using non-high-speed trains (since the tracks would be ridiculously expensive), the passage might take 9-10 days between the two closest cities on the line. Worse, boats would probably still be necessary to cross over to Japan, which would be a big part of the target market.
Perhaps the best use of the system would be to connect China and the U.S. There are a LOT of Chinese people who'd love to come to the U.S., and probably an untapped market of American tourists who'd love to visit China. The northern cities of China aren't all that far from Siberia, and the connection could be entirely by train. But the price is much too high (although reportedly Chinese people are paying $20,000 to be smuggled to the U.S. on a train car - which is then put on a barge and sent to Seattle or Vancouver - somehow I think the INS would get suspicious if an actual railroad line were built).
So in short, a train would do wonders for international cooperation, but it would be mostly useless. If you want to get to Asia fast, take a plane; to get there slowly, take a barge. Getting to Europe would probably take the better part of a month. Shipping is already dirt cheap between the continents. There's just no reason to do it.
Yep, typical russian project
--
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Does anyone else remember a book by Harry Harrison, from about 30 years ago which was the story of building the Trans-Atlantic Rail tunnel?
"Trans-Atlantic Tunnel: 'Hurrah'" I think the title was.
It's much the same idea, and shows one aproach to the engineering issues.
The Anchorage quake (1964) was Magnitude 8.5
Have they included the massive extra cost of building an earthquake-proof tunnels? The whole region between Alaska and the Siberian Peninsula is located over major fault planes. Geologist's have concluded there was a massive quake a few centuries ago that was much bigger than 8.5 and possibly as big as 9.7 (more than one order of magnitude more energy than an 8.5)
Nobody really knows how big the quakes can get out there.
Scroogle
Mmmm... yes... perfect route for a mass Russian invasion into Canada...
In the comment I just posted I said connecting the line and Japan would be difficult. Well, it sounds like that's already being taken care of. This is very important - while not too many people want to go to Siberia these days, and western Russia is just too far away, Japan might be a great place for Americans to go for a holiday.
I still think it's unlikely such a thing would be built, especially by Russia, but with Japan involved it almost makes sense.
Ok, so then the trains, have piplines on them that hookup to the ah... Wait no the trains are actually giant piplines that aren't then trains... Or maybe what your saying can't possibly have derived from the article about trains in the first place.
Well lets see, we want to connect two continents across the coldest portion of the world... 'Gee, lets go under the water...' Does this seem idiotic to anyone else? Why not build a suspension bridge overland rather than under? It would save a lot of money and be much less maintenance intensive.
As opposed to some of our higher moderated posts, 6x10^10 is 60 BILLION not 6 million.
We're smarter than that.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Other than all of the opposing ideas previously mentioned, I can think of a few things wrong with this, from a railroading standpoint.
;)
1. Russia's track gauge is 5ft0in. The US/UK/Canadian (among others) standard gauge is 4ft8.5in. This is more a nuisance than a problem, as the Russians already have to change gauges of cars at their Chinese and Eastern European borders.
2. The nearest rail connection to Western Alaska is Fairbanks or Anchorage (IIRC). It would be difficult at best to bore/grade your way from Nome to Central Alaska. (But then, if you've ALREADY gone under the Bering Strait...)
2a. The Alaska Railroad's only connection to the outside world is by sea to Seattle/Vancouver. So... unless they want to connect the tunnel to the ARR and the ARR to the Canadian (CN/CP/BCR) rail system, there's not much point to the whole thing.
If they do it, I want a ticket on the first one across... and here's to hoping they use US motive power.
--Ben
1964. Its Richter magnitude 9.2. Pictures are here See also: http://www.tsunami.gov/tpic.htm
I wasn't planning to post, but so many stupid people have, I might as well give an Alaskan's opinion. 1. The region under the Bering Sea is not an earthquake zone. The nearest earthquake zone is nearly 500 miles to the south (Idaho, the most earthquake proof state is less than that from the Juan de Fuca plate boundary). Remember Alaska is huge, and the scale is nothing like the rest of the nation. Hell, we have glaciers larger than some states. 2. The underlying water averages 50 feet in depth, it is continenal sedimentary rock with an age of roughly one billion years, very stable and similar to the English channel. Remember during the last ice age this was dry land (again like the English channel). 3. The distance between the far western Alaska and Siberia is approximately 50 miles. 4. In seismically active regions, under sea tunnels have been built. A tunnel connection Hokkaido Japan to the rest of the country was just recently built. 5. Rail roads in cold climates have been built. A little thing called the "trans-Siberian rail road" has been operational since czarist times. Here in Alaska, freight of coal, oil, timber and manufactured goods travel between the interior of the state and the ports quite easily. If this wasn't so my town would starve. (Fairbanks Alaska). 6. Alaska and Siberia only make cold air. This is for the most part true. But this thinking is flawed, goods from the region the tunnels is located in would not be the sole cargo of the railroad. By this rationale the Suez canal is not important because the only thing there is sand, or the Panama canal is not important because the only thing there is jungle. 7. Building on permafrost is very possible. The trick is to take note that it is there. The famous "sunken houses" are caused when people do not take precautions and end up destroying the frost. We have roads, building and, oh yeah a huge ass pipeline built on the stuff. A railroad would be a piece of cake. However there are a few problems. Mainly there is no rail connections. The trans-Siberian railroad terminates several hundred miles to the south of the crossing point. Similarly, the Alaskan Rail system is isolated from the rest of the North American system by about 500 miles. From the northern terminus (my home town of Fairbanks) of this system it is almost 700 miles to the proposed crossing site, these 700 miles are filled with mountains glaciers and rivers of gargantuan size. Building a railroad from the Canadian border to the Bering sea would be almost as difficult as the trans-continental railroad, plus the construction of the railroad in Siberia. Finally there is a little tiny law that would need to be overcome. A law from the 1860's known as "The Jones Act" prevents foreign cargo from entering Alaska, it must pass through another state to be legal. This law was enacted on the behest of eastern coal intrests to prevent the US Navy from using coal from the vast deposits in Alaska. It has also allowed other states to exploit Alaska in a fashion similarto the British exploitation of the 13 colonies. For cargo to pass from Siberia to Alaska, this law would have to be repealed. After the initial investment, the freight throughput would be enormous. I doubt passenger service would take off. A train from London or Tokyo to Los Angelas or Seattle would take weeks. Considering a rail ticket from Washington DC to Chicago costs as much as a plane ticket, I doubt people would want to pay, I mean how many people in the United States ride across the continent by rail? Five, now how many people want to ride across two continents by rail, anybody, I though so. But this project would be profitable after the initial investment, there is so much money in cargo from the Pacific rim (Seattle was not built solely by Microsoft) that this thing if ever built would be profitable (and not in the pets.com sense of the word). But alas, this idea has surfaced and tanked many times, engineers love our little straight, it is the last major divide not bridged, it drives them nuts, much like our little Yukon river gives hydroelectric companies wet dreams. I hope this helps all you people in the small states. MF Fairbanks Canada ooops I mean Alaska.
AUGAUUUGCGCACAUAUCUCAGCGAAUGAAAGGGAUUAA
60 billions bucks is not that much. After all, some oil company in Siberia generates so much money quite quickly and if this project is serious, I would not be suprised to hear about some Siberian Oil export.
BTW, I am a bit afraid of the human issues, especially when we know about what happened to Tchernobyl or the Koursk craft.
Maybe they'll have to prepair a rock-solid hi-tech project so that they can safely proceed ?
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
There are some pretty decent models showing how availability of rail transport has made lasting change in property values of various areas. This is IMHO the real way of establishing if this kind of project would make economic sense(in Hong Kong, the private rail roads are subsidized by giving them a portion of the rise in property tax revenues that happen when new rail lines are built).
I have to admit that this is funny. Sorry.
EverCode
Last I heard, Russia was facing severe unimployment, economic trouble, a suffering economy, and so on. One way to solve these problems is to get some really huge project that will need massive ammounts of manpower, and this tunnel seems like it will fit the bill. Some thoughts as to what it would need: Basic Labor (digging, hammering) Skilled Labor (Rivitting, welders, engineers, masons) Surveyors Logistics People Mess Crews (since we can assume they'll work on site) Tents and houskeeping Drivers Heavy Machinery Operators The people back at farms or foundries to provide materials As you can see, the list is enormous, and everybody's being paid, boosting their economy. In principle, it would be like the public works projects of the Great Depressions.
Easy. America would give it to them. Anything to keep those engineers from working for Iran or North Korea.
Of course, this is all academic. This project will never get started. Its just not economically viable.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
I can finally ship packages via UPS Ground to Asia and Europe!!!
Zetetic
Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.
Elench
A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
BART has a tunnel under San Francisco Bay. It went through the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake with no problems. Japan has several very long undersea rail tunnels, and have not had any problems with them during quite a few quakes. Not a problem.
what is going on here?
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
This is going to be a great move for Russia. This is going to open up the way for tourism to bring in the dollars, and more importantly, for easy, quick contact with the Western world, so that they can catch up to us in economy and technology.
Shoot, my passport's still good. I'd love to take a week off and take the train to Russia... there's just something more appealing about it than flying.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Maybe this is a good idea. Or maybe that is what the KBG want you to believe. Maybe this is the beginning of their grand scheme to conquer the U.S., and overtake the U.S and the final King of the South before the final showdown against God in Armageddon.
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
Didn't know that.
:)
See me over here, I stand corrected
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
Everyone said their idea was close to idiotic, as it involved way too much planning, money, and time. So if their logistics were a nightmare, just imagine those related to such a feat of engineering/economics/politics/ecology/you get my idea.
However, I'm pretty sure that if that tunnel gets built (as if!), those guys will buy their tickets and just go for a ride across the Bering.
Go light, go fast - alpine style!
Veni, vidi, vici.
This is a brilliant idea for the Russians.
They just need to get the United States to partner with them, and then when they fail to meet their financial obligations, the US will cover for them.
It's working for the space station, why not a tunnel?
And while they are at it the Chinese could pump a hell of a lot of volume down it. to say nothing of central asia, or, having built the tunnel, oil and gas pipleines from central asia joining the Alaska pipeline.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Its the name of the one that carries the people thats why you've heard of it.
The frieght trains have different names entirely but could be called anything as the name of the tunnel is irrelevant to the name of the train that runs trhough it.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
60 billion in funding, spread over 20 years, and partially funded by the World Bank, and perhaps Japan and the US could certainly be accomplished.
"I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."
Split $60 billion (£40 billion) three ways and you have $20 billion (£13 billion). Assuming Russia gets a nice loan from the World Bank to help them cover their share, this could easily be pulled off. $60 billion to the US is like $6,000 to your average computer programmer. Sure it's a lot of money, but you could afford to spend it if you really wanted to.
--
It's already possible to fly from Nome to Siberia. Sounds like a cool trip, I wouldn't mind doing it sometime. Why a $60B rail would add much benefit over this, I'll never know. I'd love to see it happen though.
--relations with the US --trade with the Americas --jobs for the unemployed Russians --It could restore much of the national pride that has been lost
We Americans are quick to forget how important rails are in commerce. The majority of our products are shipped by train. This project is more than just Amtrak ( and with Amtraks record of crashing, I hope theyre not allowed in that tunnel). The products dont have to originate from Siberia and Alaska either. A constant flow of goods between the land masses would benefit trade. Most big ships (PANAMAX) cannot go through the Panama canal either. This tunnel would mean competition with the container ships as well.
besides, me thinks that would be one helluva roadtrip!
Poor greenland. No Broadband For You!
Actually they've built them over frozen lakes when they've felt an urgent need (but occasionally they drop a train into the lake that way)
Railways have built in load-spreaders and they aren't warm like houses.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
There is no way anyone could build a tunnel here. Take a look at the earthquake record here and 5.0 magnitudes are very common in the region. In the 1960's Alaska had a 9.0 quake that destroyed hundreds of miles of the sea bed and the shore. NO WAY!
Will the last company to abandon Linux please turn off the lights??!
I had the chance to walk aboard a huge seaship that carries iron ore from Brazil all the way to Japan, going under Africa. It then goes empty to Vancoucer, where it gets loaded with coal, and back to Brazil, by the straits of Magellan, under Tierra del Fuego (because the ship is so large, it is beyond the Panama Channel size). And then it flips coal for iron ore, and again it goes, always traveling eastward (it seems it the ocean currents favor that direction).
Turns out, for long haul, you can't beat the costs of sea transportation. It took large q's of rail wagons to load such a ship, you bet. And it is just unimaginable to make iron ore get to Japan more cheaply.
For the short haul, on the other hand, trucks tipically crush rail transportation -- simply because it goes from door to door, saving the change of transportation mode ("the last mile" is generally trucks, anyway).
Between a rock and and a hard place, rail companies are tipically subsidised (esp. in Europe) or having poor returns/facing consolidation (U.S.). Ok, I am not going to give the last word on this -- I haven't gone far enough in the analysis -- but it does seem to be a means of transportation under check. The "chunnel" was a money pit -- no investment return in sight, though a much more favorable situation than this pharaonic siberia-alaska tunnel.
The plan the article depicts is clearly aiming at long haul transportation. But, obviously (as it is a tunnel under the sea) it is competing with sea transportation. And, like the joke about the bear and the two hikers, it has to prove not simply that it can work, or that there are things to transport between Alaska and Siberia, but rather that rail would do it more cost efficiently than ships sailing over the pacific.
Dito.
-rcastro0
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Are there really railroads to make the rest of that trip possible? At least in my world atlas, there are no railroads over the Suez canal, which would be necessary to get from Asia to Africa.
If they can show that this thing can make more money than it will cpost then people will be queuing around the corner to fund it.
Remember the Suez and Panama Canals
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Antarctica certainly isn't connected by rail, and the only way from North to South America is by boat or a dangerous jungle trek through the Darien Gap. And Australia doesn't have rail or road connections... so that's 4 of the 7. :-)
Alright I will weigh in because I think this is an interesting idea and it needs the right business model.
First, this project would not cost $60 billion, in fact, I would peg it at $180 before $60 because people tend to TOTALLY underestimate these types of projects. Since I'm not doing this study we will peg the total costs at $120 billion.
Second, economics. It must be cheaper for consumers of natural resources to build this tunnel rather then import oil, natural gas, and coal from this region rather then from traditional sources. Honestly, I would say there is an extremely good chance this could happen within the next 20 years. (Think LONG timetable to complete something like this and Alaska isnt too damn forgiving and neither is Siberia). With the uppidtyness of OPEC, deregulation of the power industry in the US and abroad, the instability of the MidEast and South America and increased enviormental conciousness in the US towards offshore drilling getting oil out of the ground in Siberia cheap to the US could stablize energy prices not just in the US but worldwide. Also, international oil and energy concerns (Shell, Texaco, ExxonMobil, Enron, Williams) would be more apt to develop the Siberian oil fields if they had an easier way of transporting oil out of the region.
Side note: I really wouldn't worry about terroist, reactionary, enviormental concerns on the Russian side of the line because quite frankly this thing would be generating so much hard currency for Mother Russia anyone would be shot dead if they looked at the tunnel crosseyed. Can you say Spentaz --sp commandos patrolling the tunnel.
Food for thought - PG&E, the California Electric company has taken out $4 billion worth of debt THIS YEAR to cover the spread between consumer prices and actual prices of energy. PG&E could be bankrupt just because of the destablizing nature of the commodity market when it comes to outside forces such as OPEC.
Finally, this is only the pipe that would run along with the tunnel itself. Trade in coal, manufactured goods (previous post talking about a Tokyo bridge), and a host of other materials could make this a viable project. However, the governmental (US-Russo relations), enviormental (what happens if earthquake), political (OPEC, budgetcutting), human (Who the hell wants to work in Alaska in -60F), and technical (permafrost, LONG tunnel, harsh conditions) are much tougher to overcome then the economic ever thought about being.
Where did they get this b*(%sh$t? /. should not post this crap.
No Russian newspaper has anything about this project. It's just a nonsense, and
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
The Chunnel trains are powered by electric motors, with electricity supplied by the British/European grid. Yet the Chunnel is still ventilated to keep the air inside fresh.
Now, aren't most trains on the North American continent diesel powered? How would you solve the problem of exhaust fumes lingering in what amounts to be a 60 mile (read 100 km!!!) pipe?
Trains in Russia (and in most of Asia) are largely just like European trains: electric. So which one will it be? Will North Americans build more electric trains (finally) or will Russians build diesel engines that are able to run in North America, where there is no train power grid?
Finally, don't trains in Russia run on different tracks? i.e., is the gauge of the track (the width between the rails), the same in Russia and in North America?
Veni, vidi, vici.
BC Ferries has three catamarans for sale. The PacifiCat Explorer, and the PacifiCat Discovery are currently in service in British Columbia. They're the second-largest aluminum-hulled catamarans in the world, and can do 34 knots. They'd probably run you about $200 million (Canadian) a piece.
$600 Million (Canadian, or about $400 million US) is a hell of a lot cheaper than $60 billion, and you can take your car onto the ferry... The ferries are almost new, and, while I don't like the decor too much, they're not bad.
What's Bill Gates' net worth now? around 60 billion? The perfect thing for him to use his fortune on.
--
Whatever you do, DON'T CLICK HERE!
You could take a train from any where on the planet to anywhere else. Sounds like it has a small amount of value if you ask me..
Maybe americans have never seen this, but travelling in Europe it's pretty common to take the train across water where there is neither bridge nor tunnel. You just drive the train wagons on to a ferry.
That's MUCH cheaper. The only downside is that it's slower. When going from London to Paris it's important if you can cut the time from 5 hours to 3. But when going from Seattle to Vladivostok, cutting it from 5 days to 4 days 22 hours is not.
These waters may not be ferriable a lot of the year, though. I don't know.
The oil drilling in Russia is vastly more destructive to the environment than any Alaska operation would be.
But, it's out of sight...
This is actually a pet project of a group calling itself The Global Railway, which believes rail is a sustainable transportation technology that will assist development while keeping hydrocarbon emissions and depletion of non-renewable energy resources low. The fellow Razbegin has been pumping for the Bering Project for some time. This is getting some press not only because of the push forward on the Sakhalin Island fixed link, which the Russians believe to be a precursor to a rail link with Japan, but also because the former railways minister Aksyoneyev has become an influential big-shot in Putin's government (allegedly as a tool of Boris Berezovsky).
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
There are some other perspectives on this project:
- the engineering experience of this project could be worthwhile for other projects (perhaps on a smaller scale) around the planet.
- the use of the line for goods transport is likely not to be economic. shipping is the number one intercontinental transport medium, and so pervasive and well defined that a long train trek across the north is not likely to be cheaper.
- it would be fantastic for tourism, because i could see many people wanting to take the journey, but the tourism is not going to cover the massive cost. not just to build it, but to maintain it.
in short, it is a "neat" project, but ultimately the stuff of dreams.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
The US is the largest oil consumer in the world and Russia is underproducing. However, you don't need a tunnel to move oil. Russia has other things though. It has palladium (worlds only real source), platinum and loads of other stuff.
All raw materials though are handled through state related entities or the oligarchs who acquired their 'interest' through the somewhat faulty privatisation process. These persons are always looking for easier ways to reach the market place and fewer intermediaries (and therefore more profit!).
The main point is that such a major project, would, unfortunately create even greater opportunities for the diversion of the large sums of money (probably World Bank) into the pockets of a few persons (politicians and oligarchs). The Russian far-east already has a very bad reputation in this respect (even in Russia).
Therefore on the basis of my experience in the former-Soviet Union, I would counsel caution and state that such a project would be considerably more risky than the roulette table.
See my journal, I write things there
From what I've been reading in the comments here, some fears are warranted and some aren't. The danger of a 9+ quake only occurs at a plate boundary where subduction is occurring (one plate being forced under another and melting in the Earth's mantle.) That's going on along the southern coast of Alaska. But don't forget that Alaska is a huge state, several times the size of Texas. Alaska is usually drawn to a smaller scale on diagrams/maps of the continential US since it's too big to fit.
At the Bering Strait, you'd have to ask a Geologist what's happenning at the plate boundary. Subduction usually results in mountain formation but there's sea at this one so I think it isn't subducting there. So your biggest quakes would be about an 8. (Not small itself, but 10 times smaller than a 9.)
I think a bigger problem from what I've been reading is this permafrost. If you have to drive piles to bedrock (as others said was done on the oil pipeline) for a surface railway, it'll cost about as much per mile as an elevated railway. And that's a lot of miles to multiply that over.
Again, you'd need to consult a Geologist to determine if there's a route that circumvents these hazards. If they're serious about this, they'll do that.
Well, sort of. When Stalin was in power, Russia attempted to dig a tunnel from the mainland Siberia to Sahkahlin island which (if I recall correctly) is about 20 or so miles from shore on the Pacific side. They used prisoners from forced labor camps (aka the Gulag) to dig this but they didn't get very far. In fact, I don't think they got more than a few hundred feet. You can read about this in a recent issue of National Geographic. I believe the article was about the Amur river but I may be wrong on this one... It was about the river that divides northeastern China from Russia.
"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ?"
stuff
"...but wouldn't it be fun to ultimately travel from Tierra del Fuego to Johannesburg by train?" Uh.. I think not! -- with the current state of railways here in (Southern) Africa, you might get as far as, say, Nairobi !
Thousand million == 000 000 000 == billion
Million million == 000 000 000 000 == trillion
Thousand million million == 000 000 000 000 000 == quadrillion
Is the correct answer. England and indeed the whole of the UK and EC/EU standardised on these in the early 70's as part of the Standard Units / Metric system.
Some old fogies still use British Billion (and ounces and gallons, for fuck's sake...) but anyone aged under 30 will have been taught ONLY Standard Units / Metric at school.
What a shame the US can't get its act together and teach ONLY SU/Metric at THIER schools, eh? :-)
Speaking as a 29 year old Brit.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Back a looooong time ago (more than 4 years) there was alot of talk about an Alaska-Siberia bridge that would carry automobile, train, and data traffic across the frozen expanse of ocean to Asia. Why might one ask if one were so inclined? Well Asia happens to be a pretty large producer of items that are often sold in places like America. While Russia (especially Siberia) might seem like a rather bland place to run railroads, Asia is exciting and warm. Not only could you run things like rail and data lines you could run another thing people like. Yes you may have guess, oil! Say you were a small-ish island nation with a heavy dependence on foreign oil imports vis a vis Japan. You help fund a solid transportation route between Asia and America, run some piping to somewhere like Korea (where you've got decent export agreements) and blamo you can lower the price of your oil a great deal. Korea and China also get the benefit of the foreign exported oil (and thus contributing to the effort to build such a solid transportation route between continents). Russia invested in rail transport instead of road transport (as opposed to the US) during the cold war and have a huge rail coverage area. If you connect this to the North American continent you suddenly have a fairly inexpensive route through which you can ship manufactured goods and consumables. A Chunnel (or bridge) would not only symbolically link the two continents but would also benefit anyone interested in international trade. The Pacific ocean is pretty fucking big and huge container ships are very expensive (especially when compared to rail transport). If you could start shipping goods from here to Asia by an inexpensive means (rail) you can lower the costs (great for cash starved economies) and increase volume. This of course is not a business plan or idea where to get money to build it (hint: get anyone who can benefit from a land route between continents to chip in some cash) but it is a reason (I think it's a decent to good reason) why would you even WANT to get from Alaska to Siberia by rail. Oh yeah, if suddenly vast amounts of exports started going through Alaska people might remember that it is indeed a state of the Union.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What about sending Sylvester Stallone??
Before we get too fired up about this, there are
a lot of things to think about. For one,
rail is not of uniform guage (distance between
rails) worldwide. Locomotives and cars designed to operate on one guage will not work on another, period. The best one could do with current technology would be to unload and reload all passengers and cargo at each guage change.
Secondly, standards differ significantly even within North America on things like in-cab signaling (yes, they have that), procedures, etc. While this is not as difficult a problem to deal with (locomotives and operators can be switched), it exists nonetheless.
Finally, I think a much better investment of capital would be to improve the USA's own rail system, which has been terribly ignored by the government for decades now.
According to the article, the bridge's design is by a T.Y. Lin. His wacky idea is to tow in prefabricated pieces and connect the spans together; which will be towing the support in, sink it and make it stay, then put the bridge span on top. It says there will be 220 spams, which will be 1200ft each except the 2 middle spans which are 1800ft. The bridge will be of a triple deck. Oil pipeline at the bottom, then high speed rail, then an actual seasonal road deck. The suspension cable spans would be encased in concrete to protect from weather. The bridge will naturally hop through the Diomede islands of course.
There was also a little section on a page in that same article about an idea for a tunnel under the Bering sea too. It's not too hard to dig a tunnel under the sea either, its only 180ft average deep.
Are these ideas crazy? I think so. Is it possible? Yes, but why do we need a land connection? Lots of money and effort will have to go to making this happen anyway. Don't forget the fault lines, and the earth quakes that happen all the time in that region. We will have to definately deal with the weather and permafrost. There's no economic feasiblity for a link other than for natural resources. It's still cheaper to send things by ship anyway. Train shipping is going to be too expensive to worth it. Sure its faster than ship. But if you really want something to get there fast, why not air?
Use trucks and busses. Or don't send passengers through it.
Erm, aren't Tierra del Fuego and Jo'burg on different tectonic plates, which are gradually moving apart? Can we say "Cracks and flooded tunnels"?
Sorry, but I need to say this stupid fact.
:)
AND
To my knowledge, there are no trains connecting even Mexico to Colombia.
So an InterContinental ride by train is far, far in the future.
The only place in Latin America wich is suitable to start this TrasAsiatic journey is, MIAMI...
err....no, I mean it, is a deliberate mistake.
OK...5000 miles on train that can do 200 mph. A non-stop trip would take 5000/200=25 hours, and you're still in the most remote part of either Canada or Russia. How long does it take to fly from NY to Moscow?
What I'm getting at is this actually worth the $60M?
"Telecom cables are flexible, trains dont usually like it when their tracks start to change shape."
Within a reasonable limit (say a couple of meters per kilometer), railroads are actually quite flexible. Think about the differential expansion on the rails in a mountain railroad when the temperature goes from -15 deg.C to 10 deg.C between dawn and noon, for example.
Earthquakes are another matter...
sPh
There is already a rail link between the east cost of the FSU and Europe, but this link has been in operation for some time and it has been a consistent money-loser. Here are just some of the issues any rail-based link between the US West Coast and Asia would have to overcome: Crime- the US operator of the Trans-Siberian Land Bridge (TSLB) has had to go and pick up 'abandoned' (empty) containers from inside Russian ARMY BASES located along the railroad. High pilferage rates mean that only low margin cargo like scrap metal will be sent via rail across the FSU (former Soviet Union). Existing alternatives- Container vessels can make the voyage between the West Coast and Japan in under 10 days. Competition and overcapacity are currently keeping rates low. Lack of a market on the Russian east coast- most of the rail traffic across the FSU ends up in Europe. Cargo from the West Coast goes to Japan, PRC/HKG, SE Asia and to Europe via the Suez; building a rail bridge only addresses part a small percentage of cargo shipped Westbound across the Pacific. One could argue that raw material could be shipped Eastbound to the States and Canada, but the infrastructure to send oil, et al already exists, albeit via Europe. Essentially, there are other ways of shipping goods from North America to Asia/Europe. There's no market in the FSU that can really justify this kind of cost, and no one has the confidence necessary to ship high margin goods like Playstations or VCRs across Russia.
Is the tunel to be a combo road/rail tunnel, or train only, or what? Or is it just some UK version of English that a "road" is actually something that trains travel on?
Can anyone clairify?
$60 Billion is less than the proposed missle defense boondogle will cost. Even if noone ever uses the tunnel, it would be a better use of the bucks than a welfare project for a bunch of politically connected defense industry fatcats.
000 000 = rillion
000 000 000 = retard
000 000 000 000 = billion
000 000 000 000 000 = bastard
000 000 000 000 000 000 = yadda yadda
000 000 000 000 000 000 000 = 42
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
ultimately travel from Tierra del Fuego to Johannesburg by train
To just build a train from Tierra del Fuego to McMurdo and from the pole head back from there? Now, how do we connect Australia and New Zealand... :)
Be Seeing You,
Jeffrey.
Time Lord, Dark Horse: The Techno Mage of Gallifrey
This would be a great accomplishment, but it would be twenty years from when they start. This could help Russian ecconomy and US ecconomy. Shipping goods between the two countries would become easier, and safer.
Who would have thought 15 years ago, before the Republican efforts ended the Cold War, that we would be talking about building a tunnel between the two coutries. Two super powers that were once bitter enemies building a connecting tunnel that would have been filled with distrust and bad intentions ten years ago.
Look what happened when we hired a Russian construction company to build an embacy over in Russia. The bugged the whole building, and the bugges we built into the structure of the building. We had to build another floor, and we had to sound proof that floor.
If this does happen, this would be a great achievement for peace between our country and Russia.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Then, Michael Palin could do another travelogue.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
And on the financial issue, wouldn't Alaska/U.S. be inclined to help out with this rail a bit? Sure it's their idea, but imagining the good it could bring to Alaska, I would imagine that the U.S. would be coughing up quite a bit of cash too. Just a thought. And it still doesn't explain where all the cash is going to come from.
I'd just feel bad for the construction workers... It's cold. It's wet. It's underwater. Ick.
Frankly, after all of the points I can't see what the tunnel would be for. Planes move folks more efficiently (a detour through Alaska & Siberia is not going to be popular for most of the travelling population!) and specialized ships handle the various cargos, again more directly. While the tourist market might be considerable I can't see it justifying a US$60-billion expenditure on something as fragile as a tunnel through a seismically active area fed via high-maintenance tracks in ecologically fragile land against widespread public opposition & likely govermental non-support.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
For those of you outside the UK, Railtrack are the company that took over the running of the railway tracks during privatisation. There was a fatal accident a few months ago, then it was realsised that Railtrack had not been performing enough preventative maintenance over the years. Consequentially we had 20 mile-an-hour limits placed on many sections of track. I recently took 4 hours to complete a journey that usually takes less than two.
I've a journey to make this weekend, from Leeds to Leicester and back. Railtrack are rebuilding Leeds station, and the work was supposedly to have been completed over the holiday period. It hasn't, resulting in trains being replaced by buses. I've no idea if my train will be running this weekend.
Don't forget that Argentina is so scarcely populated that we don't have a railway to the South. And Tierra del Fuego is an island, so you'd need more tunnels (keep the zeros goings!).
BTW, if the cost of it were like U$S 250M I'm sure our gov would quote U$S 2000M (8:1 rule of corruption). But I've heard that Russian is still more "inefficient" (I would guess it's 40:1, but I don't have enough experience with that gov).
If it did, then the rules for Risk would have to be changed...with a train from the canada to nearly china, I think that single territory troop reallocation rule is put highly into question...
At present, you can only take a train as far as Panama. The Darian Gap effectively isolates Panama from Columbia with a couple hundred km or so of jungle, malaria infested swamp and brigands.
Sounds like someone just wants to travel along all the dotted lines in Risk. Now if they'd just make a good way to invade Australia!
"So, that's two cannons and a horse I'll move in to Mexico, I'll wipe fish tacos off the face of the earth, once and for all."
Let's get real. If Russia could find the cash to do this, I don't think the State of Alaska would be paying for a rail from Denali or Fairbanks to Nome. Sure there is some use for it, but the cost is waaaay too prohibitive. There aren't enough people up there. The population of Alaska is still quite a bit less than a million souls. That's even counting the soulless Gov. Tony Knowles and his moronic Environmentaldisseds.
If it could work, I'd love for it to be put in. I love Alaska, I'm just happy to not be shovelling snow this year! Guess I'll be mowing my lawn this weekend or next, though.
drive stainless
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
$60 million dollars will buy not quite 3 jumbo jets (more like 2 and some parts). Maintanence on these jumbo jets would be far more expensive than a train. Airports rated for jumbo jets to land don't yet exist in western Alaska.
There is no ralroad connecting Nome to the Alaska railroad. Even if there was, the Alaska Railroad isn't connected to any thing anyway (it runs between Seward and Fairbanks).
It would be a very large project to connect to any rail line in Canada. Freight would go buy barge to Anchorage - as long as it was on a barge it could go by barge to Russia.
You don't need the train to go anywhere to heard tourists on it (see Alaska Railroad above). Princess Tours could probably come up with $60 million as long as they got a posh hotel at either end of this thing and an airport to land jumbo jets full of tourists.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
Finally, this is more then the US & "The Russians" (has anyone told the US population they're not all Russians & there's now a bunch of country's where the USSR was?)
According to my handy National Geographic Atlas, none of those "bunch of countries" are anywhere near Magadan. Although there are many, many ethic groups in the nation known as Russia, it is common parlance to call them all "Russian," even though not all of them are Slavs.
You may have encountered a similar distinction between ethnicity and nationhood in Canada, the Untited States, and pretty much anywhere else you've ever been.
Happily American,
Kevin T.
> wouldn't it be fun to ultimately travel from
> Tierra del Fuego to Johannesburg by train?"
There are more issues that needs to be addressed:
1. The only way from Asia to Africa is across the
Sinai desert, where there are no rails.
2. If you manage to get into Africa, how are you
going to cross the Sahara desert? There is no
rail from Sudan to Uganda, so you're toast.
Sod that, put the money towards improving society and feeding, healing and educating the people.
This is completely different - this is a tunnel. This is a project that like the Channel Tunnel will be "built" by boring out soft rock at a depth of several hundred feet below the sea bed. There is no enviromental reason why this project should not go ahead.
As much as I'd like to continue quoting from your rather lengthy attacks on Black Art (the poster above), I assume that, while you obviously did not read the article all the way through, you did at least read all of your own comments before you posted them.
From the article:
"On the American side a road would have to be built from Fairbanks in the face of objections from environmentalists. For a rail tunnel, the nearest North American mainline station is at Prince George, British Columbia, 1,200 miles away."
The tunnel would be 60 miles long. The Alaskan/Canadian side rail link would be 1,200 miles long, and would be on the surface.
Now apologize to Black Art. He's probably used to this -- he's been on Slashdot for a long time.
After all, what other state gives you a check every year after you fill out your tax form?
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
I actually live in Southeast Alaska and our ferry service (the Alaska Marine Highway System) sucks. It's expensive to keep those things running too! My home town (Juneau) actually does not have a road in/out. We rely heavily on Alaska Airlines and the ferries for travel.
Don't think that those in charge of this idea haven't thought of the ferry system before you! I'm sure they know much more about the weather considerations and the such than you do...
-DCookie
My Sig is a SG-552 Commando
My SIG is a SG-552 Commando
So, I suggest a modest investment of a fraction of the proposed cost in: CargoLifter. A decently large fleet wouldn't cost tens of billions, and would provide cheep fast enough cargo service. We could scrap the alaska-siberia issue (being close is not as nescesary), and concentrate on moving stuff between the pacific coastal areas (like San Francisco up to Vancouver (is it?) over to Japan, Hong Kong and some of China). See also: a summary of the cargolifter project.
Now I am a fan of both trains and airships, so ultimately I should like to see both come to pass. But before the bearing-tunnel is a good idea, I should like to see capable, speedy, regular, and affordable rail travel instituted between North American cities at least, then central america and south america too. By regular, I mean Boston to Chicago or Washington at least four times daily (one way), and close locations like Worcester to New York (or even just Boston), or Houston to Dallas, hourly or if they're really close (like an hour appart) then half hourly.
-Daniel
Ahhh. The Swiss Rail
... put all that money into an investing account, then use the interest to build big ferries, drive all the trains onto those ferries, and shuttle everything back and forth.
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
1. Ice makes ferry and barge service impossible during some seasons.
2. The Bering sea is the home of the worst weather in the Pacific. And that's on a good day. Enough barges and cargo are lost in that area that the media doesn't even report them anymore. You just expect it. There is a Coast Guard vessel that does nothing but cruise back and forth whacking seventy millimeter shells through floating cargo containers so that they won't become nav hazards. People travel by air, and the only thing that goes on the barge is stuff that can be replaced.
On the other hand, If we really want to get to Siberia, we can fly out to Diomede and walk the rest of the way during the winter.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Bingo. Time travel.
wouldn't it be fun to ultimately travel from Tierra del Fuego to Johannesburg by train?"/em
Are there railways accross / under the Suez channel? Would the political climate Israel - Egypt allow it?
It would be funnier that the ultimate obstacle to this ride would be a manmade one.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I heard about a project for a tunnel Taiwan - mainland China. Would it be more difficult (technically / politically / economically)?
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I totally see their point of view. Just last week, I was playing CivII on King. I was having trouble defeating the Persians until I captured their first city (took 10 cannons to do it -- all their cities were walled). The problem was that I'd take a turn moving next to their city and they'd get a free shot on my cannons (with 1 defense). When I finally captured that city, I just railroaded in all my cannons to their other cities and captured them in maybe 5 turns.
Russia had a totally good reason to make railroads a different size -- so we couldn't roll our cannons in!
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
So exactly how are the Russians going to fund this thing? It's not like they got money to blow all over the place.
I know! All they have to do is capture Vash the Stampede, Collect the 60 Billion Double dollar reward and then use half of it to build the tunnel!
--
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
who *wouldn't* want to ride a train to Siberia?
:-)
Russian dissidents? Crimean Tatars?
And what with global warming and all, maybe Siberia ain't such a bad spot to visit after all.
If you are black and wear always sunglasses, the ultraviolet radiation from the Northern ozone hole (20 years from now) won't do so much harm.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The Russians, who have lots of oil, are also the masters of oil pipeline technology, and build pipelines that make ours look downright silly. They have lots of transport for their oil. What they don't have are countries with hard currencies willing to purchase the oil.
If you think that drilling in Siberia is any less harmful to the ecology than Alaska, you have another thing coming. In Alaska, there are strict rules about how, where, when, and what happens in the oil patch, and there are a bunch of folks standing around to make sure the rules are followed. Penalties for infraction are severe. In Siberia, there are no such rules, and no folks watching, either.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
The closest railway to my knowledge on the west of the bering straight is the BAM. It seems not finished yet (the last shortcut tunnel is to be build), and isn't profitable. A link to Japan looks like a way to make it sustainable.
And think a bit about what it took to build the BAM: thousands of prisoners, and more than thirty years. The costs of maintain nd repair are enormous, and it is not really operationnal.
As far as I can tell, they stop below 190K, as well as most things do, even gulag: the steel breaks! And the BAM lays in the frendlier part fo Siberia.
If they want to build it, they'll have to face the same difficulties: temperatures below 190K (-40C), rugged terrain, permafrost... Plan 50 years to build the railway TO the bering strait. I guess no democratic nation could ever complete such a project. It costs too much money, lasts for much too long for politicals to be interessed, and there are no gulag workers...
A little geography lesson: the Panama Isthmus does not have a railway all the way across it. So, even if the other railway systems were connected, you could not cross from South America to North America-- that is, last I checked.
who would want to partner with the russians on something this big, with no economic benefit and with the huge potential of a major disaster?
remember these people tried to extinguish the moscow tv tower fire by pouring water on live electrical cables feeding the tv transmitters for 3 hours because no one thought of turning the power off when the fire was first detected.
the people on the mir were lucky no one was killed during the 15 years of failures and disasters! and don't me started on the huge waste of money on the iss!
what a shame they don't use some of this money to secure the leaking cherynobl reactor and those sunken rusted nuclear subs in murmansk harbor leaking radiation into the sea...
russia now has the dubious distinction of a *falling* lifespan for its citizens due to the terrible condition of the public health system on a par with some *advanced* nations in africa...
"...can you imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these? That'd be some serious power!"
I'm sure some third world country would or has paid them a few billion for a couple nucular missiles.
--
you are not what you own
it's a sig, wtf?
ring of fire. crack in walls. rushing water. death. gay pop music. dieing space stations. insane monitery loans. debt. Ho ho.. damn my reindeer are tired. I think i need some special dust...
There is a diference in the "loading gauge", or the width and height of the rolling stock that can run on the British and Continental rail networks. The British loading gauge is smaller, and this restricts the interchange of freight cars, limiting somewhat the utility of the Channel Tunnel.
This diference is even more profound between the Continental and American rail systems. American rail equipment has always been the largest in the world.
This can be mitigated by the use of cargo containers - which is what shippers use now anyway - by transfering containers from rail/trucks to ships and back. A rail link would save one of these transfer steps and cut transit time.
It's been proposed before -- one guy wrote his dissertation on a bridge between the two. He was a little ahead of his time, but he did build a nice little bridge from San Francisco to Marin County [that many said couldn't be done, an environmental catastrophe, yada yada yada].
The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates. Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did they use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Okay! Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts. So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made by, or for, Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Thus we have the answer to the original questions. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and Bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right - because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's ass.
They are going to have to deal with the environmentalists.
This is a sweet deal! Think about it! There is so much timber in Siberia! We could import the timber for cheap, and our environmentalists could quit complaining about how much timber is taken down in our forests. The Russians really don't care about how much timber is taken down. There is a very abundant supply there that I'm sure they'd be willing to sell to us.
This process would be economically beneficial for both countries. The Russians would be able to stabilize their economy and then get better. A path would be opened for secure entreprenuership in Russia. This outcome is very beneficial.
All this invasion bullcrap is just that, bullcrap. If they did try to invade us through the tunnel you just blow it up killing x amount of soldiers (either way). Effectively demoralizing( or possibly infuriating) them and at the same time eliminating a much needed supply route. Invading into Alaska via the pipeline would be idiotic, and easily stopped.
Just wait for the next IceAge and you will have a perfectly good land bridge.
It was good enough for migrating native americans and it will be good enough to ship kuppie dolls from asia.
On that train all graphite and glitter Undersea by rail Ninety minutes from New York to Paris (More leisure for artists everywhere) --IGY, Donald Fagen
The party's over
"Standard Gauge" in Australia is about 4ft8 (presumably that's the British standard which may or may not date back to Roman chariot axle widths), though Victoria uses 5ft3 or so.
(This is just from memory, so it may be wrong.)
According to this United Nation's Press Release about the Bering link, two other big advantages of having this tunnel link would be "parallel fibre optic communications and energy distribution systems". Now that the satellites communication links are packed and we keep shooting more, and knowing canada's hydro-electric capacity to sell energy at great prices, this would provide indeed "new economic opportunities".
Except for the Aussies, the major landmasses would all be interconnected by road/rail. That'd be interesting.
*laughs* it'd take a mighty long tunnel to connect to Oz... but if we get one, I hope it has a yellow brick road...
Oh, must I bow to the official standards, lest I be beaten and raped by the jackbooted thugs of the EU?
I can accept litres (hell, I'll make fun of the idiots her in the USofA who call a 2-liter soda bottle a litre and kick their teeth out while laughing hysterically, really) and metres and centimetres, and switching from a base unit of mass that weighs as much a big peice of cheese to one that weighs as much as a big paperclip, but the hell if I'll call anything a fucking milliard, that's just gay.
Besides, there is no reason on earth why we shouldn't be using inches and millinches and pound and kilopounds, so don't try to pretend that the French communist system has some sort of universal meaning that the English system doesn't, aside from easier scale conversions.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn