Russia Approves Siberia-Alaska Railway 449
An anonymous reader writes "In what could easily be one of the boldest infrastructure developments ever announced, the Russian Government has given the go-ahead to build a transcontinental railway linking Siberia with North America. The massive undertaking would traverse the Bering Strait with the world's longest tunnel – a project twice the length of the Chunnel between England and France. The project aims to feed North America with raw goods from the Siberian interior and beyond, but it could also provide a key link to developing a robust renewable energy transmission corridor that feeds wind and tidal power across vast distances while linking a railway network across 3/4 of the Northern Hemisphere."
Re:Awesome (Score:2, Informative)
Do you know how I know you've never driven to Alaska? Because you think a 300 mph train would work across northern Canada, Alaska and the Russian Far East.
! transcontinental (Score:5, Informative)
There are a lot of transcontinental railroads in the US. I'd assume they have some in Russia too. This would be an 'intercontinental' railroad.
(It's possible it could be called 'trans-oceanic' but that would be only a technicality.)
Re:Total Nonstarter in the US. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Russia approves? (Score:3, Informative)
I thought they were more broke than we are
Russian external public debt is 3% of the country's GDP - in fact, it's one of the countries with the lowest [wikipedia.org] corresponding ratio in the world. And it has a fair bit of money in absolute measures, mostly from trade of abundant natural resources such as oil and gas.
Re:Isn't there... (Score:5, Informative)
Surprisingly, eastern Siberia and even as far south as Japan are all on the "North American Plate", so in terms of a tectonic plate being of concern, it is not an issue going across or under the Bering Straight.
The map of the various major continental plates can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg [wikipedia.org]
It is a legitimate concern, but North America actually ends at Tokyo, not Nome.
Russian Railroads vs. California (Score:4, Informative)
California's high-speed rail project didn't involve any radical engineering like building a tunnel under the Bering Straits or building railroads across frozen parts of Alaska, just a simple system upgrade from San Francisco to Los Angeles and San Diego along existing rights of way, and the price has already gone from the $30B low-ball price sold to the voters ($10B in bonds and $20B in magic money falling from the sky) to somewhere around $40-50B.
There are other differences - it's possible that this is being proposed for the purposes of actually building a railroad and shipping goods on it rather than for spending money and paying off every rich community along the way, by I'm skeptical about claims that you can build a tunnel under the Bering Straits for less than you can build a surface railroad from LA to Bakersfield, or that Russian corruption is any less than the polite Californian version.
Re:Total Nonstarter in the US. (Score:3, Informative)
True, but the fly in the ointment for this idea is that transporting cargo by container ship is about 1/3rd the cost of rail per ton-mile. It's cheaper to load the freight into containers in Russia, transport those containers through Siberia to the Pacific via rail, and load it onto a cargo ship for the trip to the U.S. West coast.