Great Western Coffee Shop

My son told me about a strange dream he had. He was on a school trip to America, for some reason, but they didn't have return tickets. They were told this didn't matter because flying with British Airways – for some reason it was specifically BA – was truly public transport, walk on, walk off, no tickets required. So they walked on and were made to walk off again. The plane, incidentally, had no connecting corridor to the terminal; its door connected directly with the building.

One of the them said not to worry, he could buy tickets for everyone with an array of stolen credit cards. However, direct flights from New York to Bristol – because there were no longer any flights to London – cost $3,000 each. This made transport for the whole class too expensive even for a wallet full of stolen credit cards!

So they ended up on a bus, which took them through a tunnel under the Atlantic to France. Although they didn't actually want to go to France, but that's where the tunnel went.

What do the esteemed panel say? A trans-Atlantic (or rather sub-Atlantic) tunnel by, let's say, the end of the century? And direct flights from Bristol to the USA? I won't ask about teenagers with stolen credit cards as I don't feel that would be sufficiently forward-looking...

Direct flights Bristol / USA come and go.  Currently (pre COVID) there aren't any.

You could ask Elon Musk about the tunnel - he might well say "sure". But the evacuation provision,  whether imposed by a TSI or the ORR or the FRA, could be tricky to meet.

Don't most of our evacuations go into tunnels?

(Sorry.... )

A science fiction novel was written in the 1970s about a railway tunnel to America. Written by Harry Harrison, the British title is 'A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_Through_the_Deeps

He'd probably enjoy reading that. Thanks!

The mid-Atlantic Ridge - volcanically seperating by several centimetres each year - could prove interesting to a tunnelling engineer. Even as a geologist, I find it fascinating that America is a fathom further away from me than it was when I was born.

But then with global warming and the immense distances, would the expansion of the rails and other components compensate / fill the gap?   One of the rail programs that Infoman has brought to my attention from New Zealand showed bridges designed to withstand the most active of the earth's activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_Escape_Immersion_Equipment

It's fascinating to walk along part of it as well, although I'd recommend wrapping up warm, especially in winter.

And perhaps pack a wetsuit / drysuit and oxygen tanks ;D

Not at all, the ridge continues through Iceland and is marked a wide valley, that at one point where there is a small "micro-canyon" geologists and guides can see it widen year by year if you know where to look.  I was on a day trip though, so took their word for it...