Maryland Governor announces support for Boring Company and Hyperloop from Baltimore to DC

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In July, 2017 Elon Musk said he was verbally approved to build a New York to DC Hyperloop.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has tweeted and stated his support for the Boring Company and the Hyperloop from Baltimore to DC.

If Elon Musk’s Boring company makes a New York City to Washington DC hyperloop tunnel, then it would be 226 miles long. This would be nearly three times longer than the current longest tunnel.

Elon Musk tweeted out that he has been given verbal approval by someone in the US government to build a New York to DC hyperloop tunnel.

Here is the wikipedia list of longest tunnels.

The Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT) is a railway tunnel in the heart of the Swiss Alps expected to open in 2016. With a route length of 57 km (35.4 mi) and the tunnel system totals 151.84 km (94.3 mi) of tunnels, shafts and passages. It is the world’s longest rail tunnel, surpassing the Seikan Tunnel in Japan.

In July, 2017, Elon Musk had received verbal government approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.

This would be 29 minutes from New York city center to Washington DC city center. Boring Comapny would put up to a dozen or more entry/exit elevators in each city.

Elon Musk says traffic jams will be eliminated with multi-level tunnel networks for cars and for Hyperloops.

A snail can currently travel 14 times faster than a tunnel boring machine and a preliminary goal will be for the Boring Company tunneling machine to catch up to the snail.

17 thoughts on “Maryland Governor announces support for Boring Company and Hyperloop from Baltimore to DC”

  1. So the longest tunnel in the world was made in 1945?

    I might be missing something, but weren’t people rather… busy at that point in time?

    • 85 miles in 5 years (1939 to 1944) or 17mpyear, or 246 foot/day. They used drilling and blasting.

      So unless Musk’s big bores can match 10 foot/hour, or will mostly bore through dirt, it seems like it’d be smarter to drill and blast.

      Oil rigs can drill about 4 miles in 30 days = ~30ft/hr. So drill a starter hole that way and blast to break it up. Muck it out, and use your fancy fast boring rig to finish the job.

  2. Two words: Ground Water.

    Remember how everyone said that fracking screwed up the water table – but it didn’t because it was actually a mile below the water table. Well, this boring project is cutting right through the middle of the water table.

    • But unlike fracking this doesn’t involve deliberately pumping huge amounts various liquids into the ground at high pressure. It should just be a tunnel that occupies a tiny fraction of 1% of the ground volume in that area.

      You actively dont’ want your tunnel interacting with the fluids in the surrounding rock.

    • Well, at least their snails are on the move. Once the people inside the Beltway start experiencing the benefits firsthand, Mr Musk may get a much more sympathetic view from the US govt.

  4. Cue complaints that it’s never been done and thus cannot be done ever.

    Because profit-oriented status quo trumps first principles and engineering can’t possibly do better; /s. And eventually some weird ass russian troll factory shill/shameless neckbeard derails the whole discussion into some pointless anti-[american/whatever] bilious rhetorical dead-end.

    —
    Seriously. It used to be that these sorts of things were all but vaporware, till people like Musk & friends reliably delivered (a dollar short and a day late, but anyway). Now it’s better to hedge your bets and wait and see.

    The sooner we get out of this cabin fevered XXI^st century Earth and catch a break from short-sighted material (Earth) and time (aging; 150 healthy years to start with) scarcity, the sooner we can actually start thinking the way we ought to: like the solar system and beyond are ours.
    And less like we have to dream small and bicker over leftovers down here at the bottom of this gravity well.

    • Verbal approval, as they say, isn’t worth the paper it’s (not) written on.

      Yes. But at least nobody will die of cosmic rays exposure like they would in vaporware Musk Eisley on Mars.

      • I’m pretty sure Musk’s colony being vaporware, and people dying of cosmic ray exposure, are mutually exclusive criticisms.

      • As has already been shown, trivial amounts of mass extend the safe time at the Martian surface for life time exposure from close to 5 years to—wait for it.

        A lifetime.

        It’s the pathological skeptics’s justifications which are vaporware.

    • Verbal approval, as they say, isn’t worth the paper it’s (not) written on.

      Some animals are more equal than others.

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