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Spain, Morocco To Build Undersea Rail Tunnels
DoraLives writes "The BBC reports that Spain and Morocco 'have agreed to build a 39-kilometre rail tunnel beneath the Mediterranean Sea, to link Europe and Africa.' and that 'This plan could be put into action as early as next year...' Fairly daunting technical piece of work should they attempt it, but the prospect of an all-rail trip from Edinburgh to Tangiers is intriguing to say the least."
Spain and Morocco to build train tunnel under sea
Spain and Morocco plan tunnel link
Tunnel to link Spain and Morocco agreed
Tunnel link for Africa and Europe
Spain, Morocco to build tunnel under Mediterranean Sea
Spain, Morocco plan undersea tunnel
DON'T MOD THIS UP. MY KARMA IS ALREADY EXCELLENT (has been for months!)
Now a tunnel across the Mediteranian is not going to work. First off, Tangiers is not exactly what I would call a "business" destination. Nor is Spain. You have to dig pretty deep on the African continent to find anywhere a typical European traveler would be going. Perhaps I am missing a pent up demand for travel from Africa. It didn't RTFA.
The next problem is travel time. Sure a ride from spain to Morroco would be a lot quicker via Train. A trip from France to Morroco a bit less so. From Scottland to Morrocco... well, only for the folks who want to do it because they can.
Finally I would like to note that the 2 countries involved are still involved in a few territorial spats. That is not a recipe for success on a multi-billion dollar project.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
It's mostly Kurdish and Afghan refugees that use the tunnel to try and get into Britain. It was a pretty huge issue there last year, when it got to a point that people would regularly be rushing the security gates to try and jump onto the freight trains.
The camp that was set up near the Chunnel, Sangatte, got closed by the French authorities earlier year, as an attempt to placate the English. They Brits contended (pretty accurately) that it was being used as a base for immigration. People would live there by day, and then try and sneak into the UK by night.
Cue The Sun...
Where did you get that?
I mean I'm no authority on it.. but Morocco is not really one of the "terorrist hotspots" of the muslim world..
The King has been very adamant about keeping muslim fundamentalists out of the country. The chiefly muslim population of Morocco are indeed very muslim, wear traditional garb, etc, but are not fundamentalist weirdos.. they respect others, other religions, and generally don't hate westerners.
Aside from being poor, Morocco was a neat place to visit, and the people were surprisingly well educated about world politics and geography, considering the poverty levels.
The flow of refugees is though France and into the UK. At one time, a large building that originally was used to store the equiptment used to build the chunnel, was turned into a Red Cross shelter. This shelter has since been closed. Up to 2,000 persons were staying at the Sangatte shelter.
The Brits and French tunneled far enough beneath the floor of the English Channel so that an IRA bomb (though it would cause a certain degree of damage) would have *no* chance of flooding the tunnel.
I imagine that the same safty margins would be observed on this venture also.
By the way, the Pan-American highway has a small gap due to a nature preserve so your rally race would need to board ships. It is called the Darien Gap and is about 50 miles wide so it could also be closed with a tunnel. But I doubt if the economic incentive is there to do that way. More likely the rainforest will be sacrificed.
The ministry said that a joint Spanish and Moroccan committee of officials had already agreed a preliminary three-year plan of works to start as early as next year, with an estimated initial cost of $30m.
Er, "m" in Europe/Africa is 1e6, right? I can't imagine what sort of "preliminary three-year plan of works" in such an Herculean effort could be done for a mere $30 million.
Look at the big dig in Boston -- a relatively easy task (shorter by far, at least) with initial estimates of $4billion (I think) and 40-50% overruns, I can't imagine much more than breaking ground on either end of this proposed gargantuan tunnel getting done for $30m.
everything in moderation
So post it as AC instead of asking to not be modded up. That way the post can be modded up to be seen, and your karma will remain unaffected, as you desire.
See how easy that is?
everything in moderation
Why is the parent modded up so highly? The distance between Spain and Morocco is only nine miles (14 kilometers) at the narrowest point. The Chunnel between England and France is 31 miles long, 23 of which are underwater. This doesn't seem so impractical.
Oops!
So man redundant links and not a one has a picture of where the tunnel will be located. :(
Can anyone find one? This is the best detail I could find.
(Does anyone else get the impression that almost the only maps available online are all stolen from the CIA World Factbook? Information Superhighway my ass...)
I suspect this is because neither country has a reputation (deserved or not) for incredible timeliness or efficiency.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
No, it doesn't, the shortest path would be a straight line going through the earth. However the shortest path along the surface of the earth would be along a great circle, specifically the one going throught San Francisco and Tokyo. This may indeed have a peak northern point as high as 48 degrees north latitude.
The challenge to this lies not in refugees or economics but in engineering.
The deepest tunnel currently is in Japan and is 100m below a 140m channel. Engineering a tunnel 240m down is seriously non-trivial, and Japan is seriously hooked-in when it comes to engineering. Spain and Morocco, really have no hope of pulling this off without outsourcing the whole deal.
The tunnel would need to be 300m + 100m below sea level (1/4 mile). That depth presents numerous difficulties with removing seep water, air density, and a host of other things. The geology is not nearly as receptive to a tunnel as it was for the chunnel engineers and they'll find that it's much, much more difficult cutting through than the chalk that is present beneath the English Channel.
This is easily an order of magnitude more difficult to build than the chunnel was. I'd be surprised if it's ever built.
The EU keeps Turkey out of the EU, in large part because Turkey is a Muslim country...
Actually, it has much more to do with Turkey's incredibly poor record on human rights. A few years ago during the Danish Presidency, the European Council issued a set of requirements called the Coppenhagen Criteria, which basically made up a laundry list of minor atrocities perpetrated/ignored by the Turkish government that would have to be resolved before the country was considered for EU membership.
It's really easy to make blanket statements about the European community's supposed "intolerance" for the Islamic minority, but the criticism is far from water tight. For example, the mentioned "head scarf" policy, which is being discussed in terms of its enforcement in state-run public schools, also forbids the wearing of "obvious" religious symbols like skull caps and large crucifixes.
Many Africans enter Spain legitimately - jumping through all the necessary hoops. This in itself is not problematic. The trouble starts when their work Visas start to expire and they realize that the EU's uber-flimsy border control allows them to leave Spain and bounce around other countries in continental Europe almost indefinitely. The proposed rail link would have little or no impact on this problem because it deals with a different set of borders.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
Things are probably different in Europe (never taken a train there personally), but in the USA with our super-ghetto trains, it almost always takes longer to take a train than to drive. For commuting trains, I can take CalTrain from my house to my work. Takes about 20 min longer than driving, since it makes an obscene number of stops along the way. The only reason I'd take it is so I can read the paper while commuting. But a time saver it ain't (especially when you factor in time to get to and from the train stations).
Subways are better. BART's decent, but they'll probably never make it down to the South Bay...
As for "real" trains, all we've got is Amtrak. When I was in school, I thought about taking the train from Santa Barbara back home to San Jose. Thats about a 300 mile drive. Driving typically takes about 4-4.5 hours. The train takes (literally, I just looked it up) EIGHT HOURS and costs $82. I get 30mpg in my car so I can make the drive in about half the time and for half the cost. Hell I could *fly* to LA for about that and be there in 2 hours.
It really sucks, since I'd be totally willing to take trains to work or down to LA if they could ever manage to match a car for cost and speed...
There are some trains that can shift gauge, but most railway engineers think that's asking for trouble.
Another issue is loading gauge (essentially how big the cross section of the train can be and not create problems). The UK has a really tight loading gauge and the Chunnel has a HUGE loading gauge.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
According to the Guardian, the sea is shallower along the proposed longer route than along the shorter route. The depth of the tunnel would go from 300m to 900m if the shorter route were taken.
The tunnel will have to be significantly longer than the span of water it crosses, in order to allow for the tunnel to reach relatively non-permeable rock by the time you're under wet stuff and to allow a relatively shallow grade.
The Chunnel's average depth under the seafloor is 40m, dropping that distance at a 2% grade takes 2km of rundown on each end... and that's not counting the 100m or so of ocean you have to dip under.
Trains really don't do well on steep grades-- inefficient as hell compared to nice shallow glides, although this is less of a problem on pure-electric trains that don't have to worry about keeping their diesel generators running in an efficient RPM-range.
So, the shortest crossing point doesn't necessarily correspond to the shortest required tunnel, depending on the contours of the seafloor/coasts and the various rock formations around.
Gibraltar is also a hell of a lot funkier from an engineering perspective. The English Channel averages only about 100m deep, while the Strait of Gibraltar appears to be significantly more irregular, with bits running to about ~300m deep from what I can find on the net.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
So, if I'm correct, all of the links to the west of this map are either completed or funded...
As most of this is simply land routes, when are we gonna start the Siberia-Alaska route???
I know there's more to be considered...the extreme cold is one...the other major problem is that the area under consideration is geologically active. Not good for a tunnel...the other problem is that a portion of the "best route" is a protected wild life reserve.
The only problem is that this (like free trade zones) will not be good for the US economy...
Amtrak has not once ever been on time anywhere but Boston-New York-Washington
I used to take it between Seattle and Vancouver BC all of the time and it was fine. I also took the Seattle/Portland round-trip once and it was the same (although I hear that one is less reliable).
It sure beats sitting on a bus, IMO. The seats are nicer and so is the scenery out the window.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
It would be a cool project though.
Well the AVE (high speed Spanish train from Madrid to Sevilla) already do have airline-style checkpoints before you board - your luggage goes through an x-ray machine and you have to walk through a metal detector. It doesn't take too long. Spain has a long history of dealing with terrorism, primarily ETA.
I am not very much confident in the success of this project... Spanish railway system is horrible.
The most recent example is Madrid-Lleida High Speed Railway. It was supposed to "fly" at 350 Km/hour, and hardly ever goes over 200 Km/hour.
nirvanis
Look at the French "no head scarves" ban, as an example.
No head scarves in State schools. No religion whatsoever in the Republic's schools. The French do not really have the same approach as the US when it comes to religion, or to schools - and even less so when it pertains to both ! Essentially, France initiated free, mandatory, secular education in part to counter the influence of the Catholic church, which used to be the major educational institution at the time (i.e. end of the 19th century).
The debate about head scarves is part of a larger debate about the fragmentation of the French society into communities - or, more precisely, into ghettoes.
You may want to have a look at the report of the Stasi inquiry on that subject. This inquiry was set up precisely to decide whether or not scarves should be banned by law in schools, but it revealed much deeper tensions all over society - mostly caused by the economic exclusion of Moslem minorities.
The EU keeps Turkey out of the EU, in large part because Turkey is a Muslim country, and therefore not European enough (despite removing all references to Christianity from the now failed EU Constitution).
You are confusing religion and identity. This is a common error. Rejecting Turkey membership has nothing to do with Islam: Albany and Bosna, even though they are moslim countries, will eventually join the EU, because they are European countries. It's just a question of time (and development).
The problem with Turkey is the following: about 1/3rd of it is, for any practical purpose, European. Ethnically, culturally, intellectually. A western Turkish city cannot be distinguished from a Greek or Sicilian city.
But on the other hand, about 1/3rd of the country is, from any viewpoint, deeply middle-eastern. Of course, this includes the Kurds (a bad word in Turkey: what the rest of the world calls Turkish Kurdistan, they call it "the South-East"), but also ethnic Turks of the region. Go to a town in the east of Turkey, and just look around : you are not in Europe. You are in the middle-east. Nothing distinguishes these people from their Syrian (!) neighbours.
If Turkey was a small country on the marches of Europe, this problem could be neglected, and there could be an attempt to assimilate the whole country into Europe. But Turkey's population will soon be higher than that of any country in the EU, including Germany. Admitting Turkey in the EU would be the end of Europe as a political project. Possibly a reason why the English (and the US) support it so much.
Europe is about identity. European people suddenly realizing (after a few millenia of wars) that, languages aside, they are essentially one single people. What makes things so difficult with Turkey is that the border of what can be called "Europe" goes straigt through Anatolia. Hence lots of confusion, misunderstandings, and eventually disdain and defiance.
Thomas Miconi
Come on now, don't you remember the Golden Gate falling into the sea in 1989 and the BART tunnels collapsing?
Oh, wait, that was in my head. The biggest problem the bay area had in 1989 was concerning the supports for the upper roads on double-decker bridges spanning the bay. The bridges themselves stayed up, and the tunnels under the bay did, as well. A lot of traffic was rerouted around the bay after the quake, but that was because they had to clear the 2nd road from the bridges and rebuild them (with supports that would actually survive an earthquake).
The differences in even the most minor items in terms of building codes between an earthquake-prone area such as California and an area that is not earthquake-prone (such as Virginia) are amazing. The level of damage when an earthquake actually hits an area that is not built to deal with earthquakes tends to make people think that they are more destructive forces than they usually are (after all, here in VA people were showing off the new cracks in their walls after a 4.9 earthquake that had an epicenter a good distance away).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
The depth of 400m is not a big deal to deal with. Plenty of verticle shaft mines are dug 3,500m deep. The biggest problem with very deep mining is that the ambient temperature increases roughly 15C for every 1,000m. Obviously a 70C envirnoment is not great for miners, so they need cooling equipment. The +6C at the deepest part of this rail tunnel is not a big deal.
As far as cutting through harder stone, read up on NYC's Water Tunnel #3. Workers are excavating about 17 meters per day at a 7 meter diameter, at a depth of about 200m. They are boring through granite, a very hard rock. The tunnel is partially operational right now, but will be 100km long when completed.
In California, for example, Reagan pushed to have the interstate come right out into the Fisherman's Wharf area, but that got nixed. In the Twin Cities, where I live, we have a "Days of Rondo" celebration every year -- the Rondo neighborhood in Saint Paul having been cut in two and basically destroyed by the construction of the highway. (Poor [and black] neighborhood, had no political clout to defend itself.)
Anyway, though, we paid such an expense before, once. The social cost to this one would be less, but the physical costs of construction would boggle the mind. The Minneapolis airport's tunnel for light rail was a huge endeavor, and that's when the city's been planning ahead for twenty-odd years at least.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.