For a Bering Strait Tunnel to Work, Russia and US would have to Build Hundreds of Miles of Railways and Roads Linking It to National Grids, Verkhoturov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 20 – Russian leaders have a long history of proposing megalomanical projects that are forgotten almost as soon as they are made; but such proposals often benefit them by attracting the temporary support of Russians and of the leaders of other countries who also like to talk about giant projects.

            The latest example of this has been the boomlet of proposals from Moscow and the suggestion by Russian officials that the American government is interested in them to build a tunnel across the Bering Straits linking Russia and the US and reducing the influence of Europe on both.

            Moscow officials have even come up with detailed plans and estimated that the cost of building the tunnel would be an entirely manageable eight billion US dollars (newtimes.ru/articles/detail/252425/). But all such talk has ignored two “technical” issues that almost certainly will preclude the completion of this idea.

            Dmitry Verkhoturov, a Siberian economist, calls attention to two of the most obvious and the most difficult to overcome: differences in the gage of railways in Russia and the US and the lack of transportation infrastructure on both sides of the Bering Strait, a lack that unless overcome would make the tunnel an enormous white elephant (sibmix.com/?doc=18562).

            On the one hand, the expert notes, the two sides would have to figure out how to cope with the fact that the gage Russian trains use is different than the one US and Canadian trains do. Tracks in Russia are 1520 mm apart, while tracks in the US and Canada, as in most of the world, are 1435 mm.

            Transferring trains from one gage to another is a difficult and expensive process even where that must be done on land; but doing the same in or at one end or the other of a tunnel would be even more expensive and potentially politically explosive, given that neither side wants to suggest it is making a compromise with the other on this point.

            But on the other and far more seriously, there are now roads or railways connecting where the tunnel would run with networks in the Russian Federation or with networks in the United States and Canada. The nearest existing rail and road links between the tunnel and the national networks on both sides are hundreds of miles away.

            Such rail lines and highways would have to be built or the tunnel would not be of any use, and constructing them would be extraordinarily difficult and expensive given that they would have to pass through some of the most isolated and environmentally challenging locations on earth.

            Indeed, Verkhoturov suggests, overcoming these difficulties and building links on both sides of the proposed tunnel would be far more difficult and expensive than the tunnel itself, something that means this latest megalomaniacal Russian project will almost certainly die an early death, even if there are in fact some in Washington who support it.