Abandoned/Proposed Feasible Megaprojects

no longer surrounded by water

A northeast Canadian song goes, "Thank God we're surounded by water".
From time to time there have been proposals to change that. A few years ago there was talk about building a rail tunnel at the Strait of Belle Isle. I wrote that this would not be practical. The tunnel wouild be isolated from any other rail line by hundreds of miles. And they would have to ferry all the equipment by ship, which could not operate in winter. They had foolishly got rid of all rail lines in Newfoundland and most rail lines in the Maritimes.
I would build a rail line from Chicoutimi to the Belle Isle Tunnel, and then down to St. Johns. I'm not sure how it would run from Chicoutimi. It could run down the North bank of the Saguenay and then up the St Lawrence. Or it could aim for the Churchill River and Goose Bay.
This line would also have a port at Battle Harbor. From Battle Harbor I would run an island hopping ferry stopping in Greenland and Iceland. with overnight accomadations in these two places the boat would not need so many cabins and passaage would be a lot cheaper. And with the eighty mile an hour freight train to Battle Harbor, surface freight could go a lot faster then it goes now.
With a new railroad in Afghanistan, Iceland is the only developed country without a railroad. Along with the Chemin de fer de Belle, I would build the transIcelandic railroad.
 
Bless you, Thande (page 4)...

The deep water channel (Beaufort Deep) between the Mull of Galloway and Northern Ireland is full of dumped WW2 munitions that should have been dumped in the Rockall Deep. They were partially stored at Dalbeattie, BTW.

Project Orion always struck me as a good idea never used - as a fusion-based space pulse-jet, it had potential. Read Niven's 'Footfall' for a good example of a space battleship that beats off the Traveller Ffithp.
 
Project Orion always struck me as a good idea never used - as a fusion-based space pulse-jet, it had potential.

It is a good idea, in the sense that it's clever, but it depends heavily on the scenario in which it will be used being one in which it's considerable disadvantages are unimportant - the situation in 'Footfall' is one of the few in which that would be true, I suspect. Although I can't find the link right now, there's an essay (by Ian, I think) elsewhere on this board about those disadvantages.
 
Well, there's only so far that signalling can help. If there is an 80km/h freight train 5km ahead of a 160km/h passenger train, it's going to catch up with the train ahead in about 4 minutes if my maths is correct. If you really want that kind of mix of trains on a busy line, you're going to need quadruple track (2 tracks in each direction) in order to have capacity for high speed express trains.

Sydney to Perth is 4000km, Melbourne to Perth is 3500km, Adelaide to Perth is 2700km. The line could be very busy but it is so long that you could easily find those 4 minutes, or even longer considering the megaproject makes the passenger train do 270 and freights probably 140. Modern, centralised train control systems can easily track and organise the movements of different trains to maximise efficiency. As I said, it is done now in Victoria easily enough.
 
The deep water channel (Beaufort Deep) between the Mull of Galloway and Northern Ireland is full of dumped WW2 munitions that should have been dumped in the Rockall Deep. They were partially stored at Dalbeattie, BTW.

It became especially dumb about 15 years ago when the laying of an undersea gas pipeline disturbed dozens of phosphorus shells from the dump that washed up on the coastlines. :eek: Luckily no one was hurt.
 
People tend to be astonishingly short sighted when it comes to getting rid of stuff at sea, seemingly operating on the assumption that the ocean is bottomless and nothing ever comes out of it.
 
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