The British company proposed to create an underground maglev for the transport of goods

The British love to dig underground. The first subway appeared in London in the second half of the 19th century. Today, the total length of their subway lines ranks third in the world. And recently, the British company Mole Solutions offered to build tunnels for the delivery of cargoes under the ground.

But the goods will not be moved by the pneumatic method, which immediately comes to mind: engineers propose to build electromagnetic paths operating on the maglev principle. Due to the absence of friction, even ground-based magnetic levitation trains beat speed records - most recently, the Japanese JR Tokai train flew at a speed of 590 km / h.


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Linear engines, according to the developers, will force special trolleys to run underground through pipes with a diameter of 1.3 - 2.4 meters, and loading and unloading will have to occur automatically. Inventors do not propose to stretch these pipes to the door of each house, but to organize special storage and reloading stations. The British Department of the Environment has already provided the funds needed to build an experimental line in Northampton. The main purpose of the underground road is to unload the land routes.



The idea of ​​delivering goods underground is not new. In the 19th century, simultaneously with the launch of the metro, attempts were made to create extensive pneumatic mail - they failed due to numerous technical problems.



In addition, in London from 1927 to 2003, a special postal subway Mail Rail operated, consisting of a single 10.5 km long line, on which eight stations were located. From the very beginning, the postal trains went on electric traction and were controlled from remote dispatcher consoles.


Mail rail

At the peak of activity, the postal train transported up to 45,000 kilograms of mail every day. But by the end of the operation, the operation of the road became unreasonably expensive - according to some estimates, road transport began to cost 5 times cheaper. Not finding a better way to use or a new owner, the government decided to preserve it.

In modern cities, overloaded with communications and already existing subway lines, the cost of laying another network of underground communications can be extremely high, and therefore the profitability of such a system is a big question.