The route: in the below illustration, the approach over land from the South Island is from Picton to just before West Head (subject to survey ).
My idea would differ from the above illustration. I would both tether the tube to the bottom and where this is not feasible, due to depth, use submerged buoys; the tube would then hang below.
Power for the tunnel could be generated by tides both ways, turbines could be mounted on top of the main tubes carrying services. I would have three tubes; one dedicated northbound, the other dedicated southbound, with a service tube carrying maintenance, power and cabling.
There is no rail tube, sorry, there just isn't enough rail freight for it to be viable. Rail could use skeletal trailers to bring their freight by road, maybe allowing road trains, they'd then transfer their loads back to rail.
The service tunnel, however, could replace the main inter-island power cable, carry fibre optics, along with the tidal electric generation turbines.
The big cost is in the engineering of the tunnel tubes, and the approaches by road through the Marlborough Sounds and in the North Island. There I'd have the road going north, coming out at Porirua, and another coming in the back of Wellington at about Karori. The Porirua link would speed traffic north to Auckland faster.
Think of the efficiency gains this would generate for the New Zealand economy and the employment it would create.
"sorry, there just isn't enough rail freight for it to be viable" ??
ReplyDelete- this sounds like what Margaret Thatcher tried to claim before the rail-only Channel Tunnel was built. And this carries road-traffic too, but on special shuttle trains.
The reality is that a rail tunnel is far cheaper to build than a road tunnel of the same net carrying capacity, and transhipping rail freight onto road-trailers for the crossing is much more cumbersome than loading road vehicles directly onto shuttle-trains.
Yes, but the South Island has fewer than a million people, the North Island the remaining 3.5 million.
DeleteThe Chunnel feeds a mature rail system on both sides, 60 million people UK side, hundreds of millions on the other side. And the extent of work required on the approaches in NZ far exceeds that needed for the Chunnel.
For this proposal to work, it has to be road, as piggybacking road transport just isn't practical (volume again). Better to skeletal the rail freight instead (for a few dozen containers a day, a lot of containers go via international shippers on coastal portion of their route, no Jones Act in NZ). And I'd say that piggbacking road traffic is far more clumsy than simply switching containers on skeletals (I know, I've done both and piggybacking is not ideal unless talking long distance or great numbers as with the Chunnel).
The number of people living on the South Island compared to the North is slightly immaterial.
ReplyDeleteFeasibility needs to be done taking into account:
1. The amount of produce that comes from The South.
2. The amount of vehicles on any time period basis that currently cross Cook Strait
3. The POTENTIAL amount of vehicles who would use the tunnel if it existed (hazard the size of that number will surprise most).
4. The current number of tourists that cross the Strait
5. The potential number of tourists that would if it existed (again, that result will surprise most).
6. Separately - Companies that currently transport freight via the ferries
7. Companies that would change their operations if the tunnel existed, and therefore add to the total
Bearing in mind, in all of the above the consideration isn't more so IF people, companies and tourists already cross, and a guess at an increase of that, but more so is the hassle factor. Currently people, companies, tourists will shy away from crossing the Strait unless they HAVE to. Because it would be quicker and easier (a 25 - 30km cross, all up Wellington to Picton, approx.. 50km), the number who would CHOOSE to go south via a 30 minute tunnel compared to a 4 hour journey will be massive - Bearing in mind it isn't simply a "4 hour journey', it has to be planned, booked, arrived at early, all of which increases the cost and the time involved for crossing the Strait ten-fold
There is NO reason for a tunnel not to exist in the sense of geographical, tectonic or depths, there are tunnels in other parts of the world like Japan, China, Europe which a much longer and deeper
NZ as a country on its own would have no way of "paying" for such a expense, it would take an extremely forward thinking group of politicians, which hasn't happened since Muldoon completed the dams, national electricity lines, major roads and other infrastructure.