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Scotland-Ireland bridge

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Next: damning the North Sea.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7996965/Dutch-scientist-proposes-two-DAMS-France-England-Scotland-Norway.html

We will be able to drive across the damns from Scotland to Norway and Cornwall to Brittany.

Reply 61

Rakas21

Original post by Fullofsurprises

The economic case for a road bridge isn't very good - it's a heck of a long journey from Ireland to Southern England (where most of the freight will want to go) via Stranraer even with a bridge and they would have to upgrade the roads. It's probably the case that a lot of freight would continue to use ports like Pembroke and Holyhead as it would be cheaper and possibly still quicker, especially if there are long delays to clear customs on the Belfast end, which it is highly likely there would be. Let's not forget that in the withdrawal agreement, Northern Ireland is now a special segregated entity for customs purposes and no longer treated as part of the UK.

Yeah. You really need rail on there for the freight benefit.

Surprisingly though the existing Dublin-Liverpool ferries are pretty slow at 8 hours. If you can get a line for freight modern container trains can travel about 110mph (Italy just opened their new line) so you could have freight from Dublin in Glasgow within 2 hours and Newcastle within 4 hours. Both cities are connected from that point by good n-s links.

Indeed the rail freight industry is actually interesting. Non-coal freight has quietly risen slowly over the past 40 years and their biggest gripe is actually a lack of track access because Network Rail has to give priority to needs of multi-(year franchises over open access. It’s one of the reasons they want HS2, shifting services on to there means more freight capacity on existing lines.

Reply 62

Drewski

Original post by Fullofsurprises

All kinds of crazy things are legal in Dutchland... You've got to wonder how long the session was before he came up with this idea...

I've got relatives on Jersey and they've heard mentioned many times through the last 40 years about an idea to bridge to mainland France, about 15 miles.

Reply 63

Fullofsurprises

Original post by Drewski

You can kind of see the point with the Channel Islands though as it would presumably boost their tourism a lot, not to mention dodgy tax evasion business.

One of the most daring schemes being thought about is to connect the Aleutian Islands (and therefore the US/Alaska) across the Bering Straights to Russia. I'm surprised Trump hasn't done a deal with Putin already on this. If it was a rail bridge it would truly revolutionise the CO2 impacts of China-North America trade.

Reply 64

Smack

Volunteer Team

Original post by Rakas21

Well in today's money the Chunnel would in theory cost about 12bn and tunnel should be more expensive than a bridge.

That's not a particularly robust way of costing out a bridge today though.

The fact it's only 30 miles long does limit the cost somewhat.

Yes, 30 miles isn't that long relative to the longest bridge in the world. However, 30 miles would still make it, according to Wikipedia, the 7th longest bridge in the world. And all the bridges in that range seem to crossing mainly land.

Again, there is almost certainly nothing technically impossible in this bridge, it's just that the £15 billion estimated price tag seems severely underestimated to me.

Reply 65

nulli tertius

Original post by Rakas21

On the Larne side it’s already connected to Belfast by about 20 miles of road, the A/M77 also gets you to Glasgow (not sure how much of it is duel carriage so you may need to upgrade to allow HGV travel to Glasgow in about an hour). Same on the A75 which exists and goes to the start of the M6.

So road wise you may need to build bypasses and new lanes but that’s not especially expensive or unfeasable.

The main cost will be the new railway connections (there’s no point building just a road bridge, it would never have a chance of justifying the cost). You would pretty much have to build new railways from Kilmarnock and Dumfries just to connect to existing lines to Glasgow and Newcastle.

Break of gauge is still the big railway issue. Transhipment makes a railway much less attractive.

It wouldn't be difficult to put back the line from Dumfries to Stranraer/Portpatrick

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-51280045?fbclid=IwAR0akhNX4DJGCreCeULibj5-Tf26oBMaFx_1meNnDUmODwbUiHvaX-7hCHk

There is no real need for any new railway northbound, probably just putting back double track that has been singled. There were London sleepers running into Stranraer until 1990