Britain has always had a special kinship with our friends across the pond.
There are 248 flights to the US every single day from Heathrow alone – but there’s a rather ambitious plan to forget flights and create a physical link across the Atlantic.
What might seem like a pipe dream, the 3,400-mile transatlantic railway tunnel could connect two major cities – London and New York.
The route, nearly 145 times longer than the Channel tunnel, would cost a staggering £15 trillion.
Engineers have proposed a train that would travel along a vacuum at a speed of 5,000km/hour.
That would turn the seven-hour flight into a sub one-hour train journey.
Magnetic levitation has also been thrown in as an idea: force comes into action which does the job of counteracting earth’s gravitational pull, thereby, lifting the object up in the air.
These forces are so strong that they can lift trains, hence why the trains would be called ‘Maglev’ as they use magnetic levitation.
Some engineers have even looked at propelling carriages with jet packs ; this is very clearly suited to the infrastructure of the future.
The first whispers of the transatlantic tunnel were going around as early as 1895, as story titled «Un Express de l’avenir» (An Express of the Future) was published in Strand Magazine.
There have also been various films released about the project such as The Tunnel.
Due to the lack of technology and extortionate cost, the tunnel probably won’t begin construction for a few decades at least.
Until then,we’ll be catching a flight to the Big Apple.