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?"
$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.
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
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
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?
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."
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.
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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).
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