Boring Company received permission to drill high-speed tunnels near Washington for the Hyperloop highway

In the summer of 2017, Ilon Mask announced that the Boring Company had received “verbal consent from the authorities” for laying high-speed underground tunnels between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. We are talking about permission from the Trump administration, namely, from the Office of American Innovation created last year, whose director is the senior adviser to the president and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Ilon Musk called this network “NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop”. In October 2017, the authorities of the state of Maryland (it will pass under the Maryland Route 295 route) gave permission for the underground tunneling, and now the administration of the American capital has approved the project, the Washington Post reported .

Permission of city authorities issued on November 29, 2017. It allows some preparatory and earthworks in a fenced parking lot at 53 New York Avenue NE next to McDonald's restaurant and next to construction cranes in the fast-growing area NoMa (North of Massachusetts Avenue). However, the city administration warned that in order to lay a tunnel under city roads and other public places, the company would need to obtain additional permits.
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Parking at 53 New York Avenue NE in Washington, DC, where city officials allowed Boring Company to drill an underground tunnel.

A spokesman for the Boring Company said that the Washington station on New York Avenue, if built, would be one of many such stations on the broad network of the new transport system. There will be many such stations in the network, they will be located at a relatively shallow depth, and the platforms themselves will be small with vertical elevators-lifts for loading cars onto platforms and passengers in transport capsules.

Recently, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser specially traveled to California and visited the Boring Company, where she had a tour around the tunnel and told how new tunneling shields would allow drilling tunnels cheaper and faster than old technologies.

Apparently, the Boring Company is ready to make tunnels for moving cars on platforms and for transporting people on Hyperloop trains. Last year, Godot’s tunnel shield completed the first tunnel segment near Los Angeles - and continues to drill until now, starting to lay a route from the parking lot near the SpaceX office. It is assumed that the first tunnel will connect Los Angeles International Airport with Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood and on to Sherman Oaks, reducing the half-hour road to the airport (an hour with traffic) to 5 minutes. A network of multi-level underground tunnels unload the city streets from cars. The car descends on the elevator into the tunnel, is placed on a trolley above the contact rail - and rushes in unmanned mode along the specified route at a speed of 200 km / h. At the same speed, carts can carry both cyclists and pedestrians.


But the station in Washington is likely to become part of another NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop system, where Hyperloop passenger trains will start running.

According to the plan, Ilona Mask, the route from Baltimore to Washington will be the first element of the large Hyperloop transport system, which will cover the entire east coast of the United States.

Boring Company assumes only the drilling of tunnels, and other companies are engaged in the release of Hyperloop trains. For example, in December 2017, Hyperloop One experienced transport at a speed of 386 km / h . XP-1 capsule 8.7 m long is a carbon fiber shell on the chassis, which is levitated in a technical vacuum. The relatively low speed is due to the restriction of the test tunnel, which is only 500 meters long. Of these, only 300 meters are equipped with a linear electric motor with a developed winding, which creates a magnetic field.

Experts believe that the laying of tunnels is a relatively simple task, although this is a very long process, but it will be very difficult to legalize the underground transport system with ultra-high-speed capsules in a vacuum.