A flight from Boston to London is about 6 hours, not counting all the hours spent at the airport. That journey could be reduced to under half the time, even when traveling from Boston to New York to London, requiring not plane travel, with the proposition of a Transatlantic tunnel that would travel from the East Coast to London.
The age-old idea has been in discussion for decades, inspired by the existing Channel Tunnel. The existing 31-mile-long railway travels from Folkstone, England to Coquelles, France in just 35 minutes at a speed of about 99 miles per hour. Channel Tunnel has 23.5 miles of tunnel traveling undersea. Channel Tunnel is the longest undersea tunnel in the world, but that could change in the future.
The Transatlantic tunnel, still in the theoretical stage, would move at proposed speeds exceeding 5,000 miles per hour, much faster than the supersonic jets that would travel 1,000 miles per hour.
The 3,400 mile journey would take only about 54 minutes. The design and timeline of the tunnel are still unsolidified, but some propose building the entire tunnel beneath the ocean floor, while others suggest a floating tunnel anchored by cables and submerged just below the water’s surface, or a hybrid of the two.