Like the elevators to space, the project of a tunnel under the Atlantic than a United States and Europe, more precisely New York and London, has been more than a century. He was born from Michel Verne’s mint (son of the renowned writer Julio Verne) with his story An express of the futurein 1888. But after science fiction, the science of a pioneer of travel travels would come: Robert Goddard, responsible for the first liquid fuel rocket launched with andxito.
In 1945, Goddard patented an empty transport system “at high speeds. The general object of the present invention is to produce acceleration and deceleration and avoid friction by non -magnetic means, such as the application of fluid pressure between relatively mobile parts,” says the patent.
Just imagining this possibility is something that awakens our desire to travel: Go up to a train in Madrid and just over an hour later go to the other side of the Atlantic, in the big block (The trip would really last 54 minutes between NY and London, but for recreational effects …). Is it possible?
First, the 54 -minute trip would require vacuum trains that travel at a maximum speed of 8000 km/h. Unfortunately, the maximum hypothetical that would achieve current technology, thanks To the Hyperloop system of empty trains, we would not reach a quarter: just 1,200 km/h.
Assuming that from its departure and until its arrival, the subatlantic train manages to maintain this time all the time, the intercontinental trip would take just over four hours. Not so bad, really. The problem is that these hypothetics 1,200 km/h are still a theory and has not yet gone from 600 km/h. Even so, suppose we manage to exceed the “millennium of the kilometers”, there are other more complex obstacles than saving.
Currently, the longest submarine tunnel in the world belongs to the Eurotunnel, which has an underwater section of just under 40 km between England and France. For its construction (not for its design or planning, only its realization) were necessary six years, 13,000 workers and about 16,000 million euros. Now, only in figures, let’s multiply that per 100 …
But there is more. One thing is The maintenance of a 40 km tunnel. With its possible emergency exits, cracks or damage alarms, pressure monitoring… And another is to do it on a journey of more than 5,000 km.
Doing doing it by drilling the seabed would be unthinkable taking into account the current speed of the tunneladores and the depth they would have to operate, We are talking about a millennium just to complete drilling. The fastest option, then, would be to create a system that holds, whether by flotation or by anchor in the sea bed, the vacuum tube that would travel this train.
Then the pressure comes. The Eurotunnel reaches its maximum depth at 115 meters, But in the Atlantic Ocean this would be impossible and it would be necessary to multiply at least ten the depth … and the pressure. The system should be much more resistant than it is currently possible. And the obstacles continue …
Therefore, for now at least, the dream of a tunnel or a bridge over the Atlantic (The longest bridge in the world has 164 km, it should be 30 times longer), It is a utopia and you will have to continue using airplanes for a trip as fast as possible.