Coast to coast in two hours!

Yes, it’s even faster than the AGV [Photo courtesy of forcechange.com]

While curiously searching for jobs at organizations that will most likely never hire me, I came across two old reports by the RAND Corporation, a non-profit global policy think tank, on a high speed transit system that is fast, very fast.

During the Seventies, RAND researched the possibility of establishing a trans-continental subway system that would provide an express commute from Los Angeles to New York in TWO HOURS, through airless tunnels via Planetran (or vactrain), a high speed train driven by electromagnetic waves.

It takes a little less than six hours to travel that 2,500 mile distance the old-fashioned way by plane. If you do the math, this extreme train would be covering 1,250 miles in one hour! But since the cost to fund this project would be well over a trillion dollars, the government swiftly rejected the plan.

You can read the RAND reports here:
The Very High Speed Transit System (Robert M. Salter, 1972)
Trans-Planetary Subway Systems: A Burgeoning Capability (Robert M. Salter, 1978)

Wikipedia entry:
Vactrain

I’m assuming technology, thirty years hence these reports were published, has advanced greatly to reduce the costs to build this transit system and perhaps make it even more efficient and very, very fast. If only we had a trillion dollar government surplus rather than a deficit… Oh, the possibilities!