Make it HSR and make it start from South East Asia, go up over the Bering strait, come down through Alaska and to South America.
Take a train from Tokyo to San Francisco... I think this project is inevitable. Not in my lifetime, but maybe someone's born before I die. It's a potentially 0kg C02 journey if built right and business class accommodations would probably be 1/10th the price of a plane trip and a heck of a lot faster than a boat.
High speed rail costs $20M-$250M/mile to construct. So laying 19,000 miles of track across the Americas would cost anywhere from $380 billion to $5 trillion. At 200mph, it would take 4 days to go from one end to the other. Maintenance would be over $2 billion per year. If you had 3.5 million passengers per year (far more than pre-covid flying numbers), paying for the maintenance costs alone would be $600 per ticket. Paying off the project within a century would require charging $1,700-$14,000 per ticket.
Right. It wouldn't be built stupidly like that. You can take any project and give it the drooling moron building plan and come away with ridiculous numbers.
Let's do lowest possible speed and highest possible cost of an automobile road and we get something like 0.25 mph traffic with mangled bodies in crashed vehicles everywhere and tollbooths every 5 miles where everyone is forced to drive million dollar Bugattis.
Really, this is like someone in the 1970s claiming smart phones are impossible because you can't fit a rotary dial, satellite link, tape storage reel and a CRT in your pocket.
I think it'll be easier/cheaper to figure out how to economically manufacture carbon-neutral kerosene from renewable energy sources (rather than digging it up out of the ground) and just fly normal airplanes, than it will be to build that mammoth HSR route. And the journey will be much faster too.
The point of such a road is not to traverse it from one end to the other, it's to be able to get on and off it anywhere along its length. It also has symbolic meaning.
In it, customs officers went through the train like a ticket checker to check your passport as the train travels near jet speeds through the Russian forests.
That wasn't the plot of course, but it's part of the setting. The characters desperately cling to 19th century ideas of nationalism like small European countries still have a king even in a time where vast oceans no longer matter. There's a cadence problem with the emotional salience of our institutions and their relevance. This includes the personal.
All things start and end as ceremony and theater but somewhere in the middle, they become real.
Take a train from Tokyo to San Francisco... I think this project is inevitable. Not in my lifetime, but maybe someone's born before I die. It's a potentially 0kg C02 journey if built right and business class accommodations would probably be 1/10th the price of a plane trip and a heck of a lot faster than a boat.
The freight potential alone...