The desire to build a bridge or tunnel between far Eastern Russia and Alaska across the Bering Strait has been around for at least a century, but Russia has apparently decided that now is the time to make it happen. Within 10 years, they say, you'll be able to take a train from the western hemisphere to the eastern hemisphere in under an hour.

The Bering Strait high speed rail tunnel isn't going to be an exclusive Russian government undertaking, but rather some sort of commercial partnership that the U.S. is more than welcome to join if they want a cut of the proceeds. The project is supposedly going to be commercially viable based on moving some 100 million tons of freight a year, and it'll also make it fast and easy to send oil from Siberia to the west. As icing on the cake, Russia also plans to install about ten gigawatts worth of tidal energy harvesters along the route.

At 64 miles, the tunnel will be about twice the length of the Chunnel connecting Britain with that other country France. The tunnel itself will cost $12 billion just to bore, with much of the rest of the cost being eaten up by rail lines connecting the Bering Strait area with the rest of the Russian rail network. Plenty of people are skeptical as to whether or not this project will ever actually go anywhere (considering how many times it's failed in the past), but if it does, by 2022 or so, you could get on a train in New York and then get off in London months later and wonder why you didn't just fly instead.

The Times, via Inhabitat