Subscribe to RSSWow! Transport Tunnel To Link Sth Korea, Japan & China
This is amazing - governments this week are getting serious about an undersea transport tunnel between South Korea and Japan and possibly between Korea and China .
South Korea has announced it will move it up a big notch and now conduct an economic and technical feasibility study on building tunnels with both countries. Japan’s government and companies have also started serious work on this, including test drilling.
Map accompanying one of the proposals
There have been a number of route proposals put forward but the most favoured appears to one connecting a southern point in South Korea to a point in Kyushu in Southern Japan and a point in western South Korea to a point in China’s Shandong province.
Both the South Korea and Japanese governments are expected to engage in extensive talks on the issue.
But the amount required is in fantasy land, in the region of over NZ$100 billion. The plan would transform transport, trade, and tourism. The initial estimates are big savings in trucking goods rather than shipping them.
Forget going to the moon! Imagine the train trips on the undersea tunnels!
Reports out of Japan say digging testing work has already begun to get a feel for what will be involved.
But Korean media is also reporting that and has carried some angry public responses showing there’s still a mistrust issue between some Koreans and Japanese.
The idea of a tunnel between Korea and Japan was even talked about as far back as 1917 and then again after WWII but it became more serious a year ago, when Japanese lawmakers set up a committee to work towards actual construction plans.
For those who say it’s crazy, remember that about 15 years ago the Channel tunnel connected Britain and France and before it became a reality, there were those who said that technically and culturally, it couldn’t happen.
I have been on the London to Paris train trip and although it’s a bit slow leaving London, it’s an amazing experience and so convenient. It’s so weird coming out of many hours of tunnel darkness and suddenly finding it replaced by French countryside out of the window.
I took the photo of the UK railway station- reminded me of Britomart. Sort of.
Now imagine if we could get a tunnel between Australia and NZ.
Oh, wait. Silly idea. We can’t even get a CBD tunnel loop. But we did get integrated ticketing yesterday – so anything is possible.
5 Comments
$100 billion isn’t out the realms of possibility if China is involved… These are three pretty powerful conservative economys… Japan public debt is an issue though… Pretty cool project…
Since the opening of the CTRL the journey out of London has been much improved. Also now leaves from St Pancras station, which looks very modern and most unlike the picture above.
$100 billion for a 1,000km long sub-ocean tunnel is optimistic! I would put the price tag a bit closer to the trillion dollar mark.
BTW, I can’t make heads or tails of that map, it doesn’t seem to match any real world geographical locations. It vaguely resembles the stated location, but only about as much as Captain Cook’s rudimentary sketches of NZ match a modern map.
Yes, crazy map , the only one accompanying the proposal (which was all in Korean).
Geoff, I know you replied to this ages ago so I dont know if you’d even read this, but this is a map of the Tsushima/Korea strait, with Tsushima island in the center, Pusan in the left and the tip of North Kyushu on the right. Hope that helps.