Sunday, February 10, 2019

AOC's High-Speed Rail To Hawaii

Perhaps we could bring Elon Musk in on this as the basic infrastructure looks just like his Hyperloop scheme to get people from the suburbs of LA to the train station in mere minutes.
Submerged freeway. More at the link, so click it.
Submerged tubes containing high speed rail and hyperlink facilities will certainly do the trick. On top of that, the floating support pontoons up on the surface can be enlarged to carry service centers, rest stops, scenic overlooks, and in a financial coup, a couple of Chinese air and naval bases, the leases for which can go towards funding construction and maintenance.

We can be assured that the PRC outposts will not be used as a basis for the Chinese to lay claim to the Eastern Pacific as territorial waters or a claim that Hawaii should become a province of China.

It's one of the things I liked about being in engineering: Nothing is impossible. Now let's talk costs.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

All well and good . . . until the first Iranian submarine "accidentally" penetrates and floods the tube during routine surveillance of the Left Coast. And what about the tubes required to the U.K. and France?

Billll said...

The Atlantic tube will be easier and should probably be done first. The tube from Calais to Dover is already done and is packed with refugees. Next link is from John O'Groats to the Faroe Islands. From there it's on to Iceland and then to Greenland. These are the two links where accidental impacts by Russian subs come in to play but if we attach "pingers" to the tube like the cowbells people attach to their Jeeps, the Russkies should be adequately forewarned to check their depth before proceeding.
Musk takes over to build the hyperlink under Greenland, one last floater down to Newfoundland, and Musk finishes the job to New York City. See? Easy

Some allowances may need to be mad while tunneling across Iceland as that's a volcanic rift region and expansion joints and lava relief tubes may need to be added.

bob r said...

As reality does not seem to be an impediment, AOC should add Gravity Trains to the GND. In addition to low energy costs (assuming vacuum tunnels and maglev trains), the transit time is only about 40 minutes -- no matter where the departure and destination are!!
What's not to like?

Mark Donnelly said...

tunnels are built under the river beds in tunnels-not under the water -water pressure would collapse the tube-this is asinine nonsense

Billll said...

The artists pics which are definitely NOT engineering drawings, show an approximately 50 ft diameter tunnel located about 100 ft below the surface. Pressure at that depth would be about 3 atm or about 45 psi, well within the capabilities of cast concrete.

There are lots of other reasons that this would not be particularly feasible, flexure due to rough seas for example, but lets leave that to the Civil Engineers to explain to President Occasional-Cortex.

The Big Dig in Boston as I recall, involved casting their tunnel above water, then lowering it down to the bottom of the harbor. The big problem turned out to be leakage at the joints.