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Czechs planned tunnel under Austria

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  • Czechs planned tunnel under Austria

    This has to be one of the strangest things I've come across recently. Interesting way to become un-landlocked.
    Czechs planned 'Adriatic tunnel'

    Officials in the former communist Czechoslovakia had planned to build an underground rail link under Austria to the Adriatic, a Czech newspaper says.

    The 410km-long (255 miles) tunnel would have drastically shortened the journey to the seaside for the landlocked country, Lidove Noviny reports.

    The earth from the excavation would be dumped in the sea to form an artificial Czechoslovak island - Adriaport.

    But the 1975 plan never got off - or under - the ground, the newspaper says.

    High-speed trains

    The plan was proposed by Professor Karel Zlabek.

    He devised a railway tunnel that would have linked the town of Ceske Budejovice, in south Bohemia, and the port of Koper in what is now Slovenia, then Yugoslavia.

    The project envisaged that high-speed trains would take both tourists and exports to the Adriatic coast in about two hours.

    Work never started on the tunnel.

    But that was not because it was totally unrealistic, the BBC's Rob Cameron in Prague says.

    Modern-day engineers say building work could start tomorrow.

    But the project failed to address several key questions.

    Apart from the sheer expense, one of the key issues was whether the Austrians would have let a Communist country build a tunnel underneath their feet, our correspondent says.

    He adds for decades many Czechs have headed each summer to the Croatian coast in search of sun, sea and sandy beaches.
    Source: BBC NEWS | Europe | Czechs planned 'Adriatic tunnel'
    "Every man has his weakness. Mine was always just cigarettes."

  • #2
    Oddly, today's BBC has a story on a very similar proposal to do essentially the same thing for Bolivia:

    A tunnel to unite old rivals?

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    • #3
      Building just 50 km between France and England took 10 years and proved a financial disaster.

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      • #4
        There is a plan on the books to build a bridge between Hawaii and California. Apparently, Hawaii needed such a plan on the books in order to get Highway funding.

        Now, that would be quite a project. :)

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