Boring Company Gets Permission To Drill High Speed ​​Tunnels Near Washington For Hyperloop Route

In the summer of 2017, Elon Musk announced that the Boring Company received “oral consent from the authorities” to lay 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.

Elon Musk called this network “NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop”. In October 2017, permission for underground tunneling was given to Maryland authorities (there it will pass under the Maryland Route 295), and now the administration of the American capital has approved the project, the newspaper The Washington Post writes .

The permission of the city authorities was issued on November 29, 2017. It allows for some preparatory and excavation work at the fenced parking lot at 53 New York Avenue NE, next to McDonald's Restaurant and next to construction cranes in the fast-growing NoMa area (North of Massachusetts Avenue). However, the city administration warned that in order to tunnel under city roads and other public places, the company would need additional permits.


Parking at 53 New York Avenue NE in Washington, DC, where city officials allowed Boring Company to drill an underground tunnel

A spokeswoman for the Boring Company said that Washington Station on New York Avenue, if built, would be one of many such stations in the broad network of the new transportation 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 elevator lifts for loading cars onto platforms and passengers in transport capsules.

Recently, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser came to California specifically and visited the Boring Company, where she took a tour of the tunnel and told how new tunneling shields will make it possible to drill tunnels cheaper and faster than old technologies.

Apparently, the Boring Company is ready to lay tunnels both for moving cars on platforms and for transporting people on Hyperloop trains. Last year, Godot’s tunnel shield completed the first segment of the tunnel under Los Angeles - and continues to drill until now, starting laying the track 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 further to Sherman Oaks, reducing the half-hour road to the airport (hour with traffic) to 5 minutes. Network of multi-level underground tunnelsunload city streets from cars. The car descends into the tunnel by elevator, 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 cyclists and pedestrians.


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

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

The Boring Company only undertakes the drilling of tunnels, and other companies are involved in the production of Hyperloop trains. For example, in December 2017, Hyperloop One experienced transport at 386 km / h.. The 8.7 m long XP-1 capsule is a carbon fiber shell on a chassis that levitates in a technical vacuum. The relatively low speed is due to the limitation of the test tunnel, which has a length of only 500 meters. Of these, only 300 meters are equipped with a linear motor with an expanded winding, which creates a magnetic field.

Experts believe that tunneling is a relatively simple task, although it is a very lengthy process, but it will be very difficult to legalize an underground transport system with ultra-fast capsules in a vacuum.