What: Submerged OCEANIC tunnel and supersonic train WHERE: New York London Cost: $88 billion $175 billion Crux: Neutrally buoyant vacuum tunnel submerged 150 to 300 feet beneath the Atlantic's surface and anchored to the seafloor, through which zips a magnetically levitated train at up to 4,000 mph.The idea is as wondrous as it is audacious: Get on a train at New York City's Penn Station and hit Paris, London or Brussels just an hour later. "From an engineering point of view there are no serious stumbling blocks," says Ernst Frankel, retired professor of ocean engineering at MIT.
The idea of a train that will carry passengers across a continent or across an ocean comfortably in about an hour without burning fossil fuel is not new. Robert H. Goddard, father of rocketry in the USA, received patents posthumously in 1949 for work that he had done to develop a supersonic train. Literature and science have been captivated by the idea of superfast, energy efficient transport. Such a train would move at about 5000 miles per hour, carry passengers with slightly over 1g gravity, in a vaccuum tube, encountering no friction, levitated by magnets. The need to update our aging transportation infrastructure coupled with the dire predictions of damage to the environment from dependence on fossil fuel makes reconsidering Goddard’s “vactrain” timely. Frank Davidson wrote about his hopes for this project in "An Express of the (Near) Future in Air&Space, Dec.1995/Jan.1996. In 2009 he is organizing a group to move this project forward with the hope of developing a model to demonstrate the possibility using a vacuum tube and magnetic levitation to propel an accelerating object to the speed of sound, maintain that rate for some period and decelerate to a stop successfully. Such a model would demonstrate success of the transit mode as well as the materials required.
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