Saturday, May 16, 2009

Improbably long tunnel digest

The BBC reports:
Plans for a tunnel linking Bolivia to the Pacific Ocean have been unveiled by three architects who say it could put an end to a 130 year-old dispute between the landlocked country and its neighbour, Chile.
The tunnel would be 93 miles long and run from the Bolivian border to an artificial island created in the Pacific Ocean from earth dug to build the tunnel.

It would be good news for the Bolivian navy, if no one else.

But that is nothing when you read about what might have happened in communist Czechoslovakia.

Again according to the BBC, there were plans to build an underground rail link under Austria to the Adriatic. This one would have been 255 miles long and, again, the spoil would have been used to build an artificial island - this one with an airport on it.


Richard Young said...

Stupid question, maybe: but how did they plan to get the spoil from the tunnel head to the sea?

(In other news, my dissertation was on the first Balkan War in 1912. Would that the Russians had thought of a tunnel for Serbian access to the Adriatic back then. Might have avoided a lot of paranoia on all parts.)

neil craig said...

Dig a railway tunnel to transport it.

More usefully the Norwegians have cut 700 km of tunnels at about £7 m per km recently, which puts our costs in perspective.

Strangely enough Serbia's right to a seaport was one of the 14 humanitarian principles for which officially, all these people died in WW1 as well as the opposite being a principle for which the LibDems helped the (ex-)Nazis commit genocide.