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Bering Strait Rail Tunnel |
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Posted by WillD on Fri Sep 11 15:23:26 2009 In the course of locating the other two (IMO) entertaining concept drawings for California and Virginia I came across a relatively large amount of work by Hal Cooper. Turns out he's a big supporter of LaRouche, and a proponent of a rail tunnel between Alaska and Siberia under the Bering Strait. Regardless of his political convictions or the viability of the project he's endorsing I find these drawings to be entertaining as hell. I'm not quite sure why LaRouche's faux-scientific magazine calls him a 'railroad expert' when every one of his drawings contains the same fairly questionable elements. But here's one of his drawings of the proposed tunnel, US rolling stock alongside Russian, with three tunnels and no dual gauge track in sight. I'm not sure why we'd want to run the Alaskan tour dome cars through the tunnel, but hey, I guess its his fantasy. But even in his fantasy it'd have to be an undoubtedly shallow tunnel for the first few miles under the Bering Strait what with the portal being spitting distance from the shoreline. At least the name sounds kinda cool: "Interhemispheric Railway Tunnel Authority". Most of the images appear on a website from LaRouche's Schiller Institute, except the one above, which only appears printed in a photo. Still, if you ignore the laughable justification for their plans, or the vast oversimplification of the difficulties they'd have in bringing the plan to fruition the purdy pichures are at least entertaining. It is worth noting that they reference the break of gauge between the US and Russia just once, and then brush it aside by saying this: There is a technical issue in going through the Bering Strait railroad tunnel to Russia, because of the difference in gauges between standard (4 ft., 8.5 in.) and Russian (5.0 ft.) railways. It is suggested that there be temporarily two parallel tracks built in Russia, with one in each gauge, until a longer-term conversion to a single gauge occurs by the Russian rail system, to standard gauges.According to the CIA World Fact Book Russia has more than 53,000 miles of broad gauge track within its borders, so dismissing the break of gauge problems as awaiting a long-term conversion plan will likely entail a very long term. Still the characteristic intermodal Ro-Ro with Traxx or Eurosprinter based locomotives, the High Speed Train with maglev in the background and yet more intermodal Ro-Ros, along with the Rhor Turbo/X2000/LRC-like HSTs are all prominently displayed in the article. If you don't feel like wading through the article, then I just linked to the remaining color Hal Cooper drawings I've been able to find. There is another B&W drawing of a bridge in Russia, but its far less entertaining. It's certainly an interesting thought experiment, but it's by no means the economic panacea they make it out to be, especially when they gloss over crucial physical, systems integration, political, and economic barriers. |
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