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The 70-Mi Bering Strait Tunnel and the 1890 Cosmopolitan Railway
The 70-mile Bering Strait Tunnel may be the most exciting, and challenging, tunnel rail project ever conceived. Its narrow four-month-per-year construction window and permafrost foundations for connecting railbeds are barriers that can be overcome, if the geopolitical issues that have slowed this project from the start can be surmounted.
This presentation will cover the origin of the 1890 Cosmopolitan Railway in the 1860s, its proposed joining of the U.S. Transcontinental Railway and Russian Trans-Siberian Railway to its progression into the planned InterContinental Railway (ICR) project in the 2020-30 era. We will examine the route of the proposed 5,000-mile new rail extension to existing rail, including the tunnel crossing of the Bering Strait.
We will examine the results of an ICR Bering Strait geotechnical survey, the tunnel preliminary plan-and-profile and proposed locations of four shafts along the 70-mile tunnel route. We will see an ICR depiction of a rail station where the dual tunnels and service tunnel emerge from underground.
This topic of the 1890 Cosmopolitan Railway arose from the November, 2024 ASCE meeting at Catholic University of America (CUA) in a conversation among worldwide ASCE transportation engineers who had not heard of the century-old plan to join the continents by continuous rail: U.S., Russia, China, Ethiopia, Africa, India, Australia, South America, Europe and Asia.
About the Speaker
Gordon C. Evans, PE, Retired Program Manager Tunnel Design, D.C. Water
Gordon C. Evans, MBA, PE: Now retired, Gordon Evans was a 2013-2024 public sector employee of DC Water and Sewer Authority in Washington, DC, serving as Program Manager Tunnel Design, for DC Water’s Clean Rivers Project. The Clean Rivers program implemented a Long Term Control Plan to construct a system of combined sewer overflow (CSO) tunnels approximately 100 feet below the District’s streets to alleviate surface flooding and discharge of untreated wastewater into the District’s waterways to satisfy terms of a Consent Decree.
Mr. Evans is a registered professional engineer who has served as a private sector consultant on numerous water and wastewater, collection, treatment, and conveyance projects in multiple states. He has also worked as a public works construction contractor building water and wastewater treatment and conveyance systems.
Mr. Evans received a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from Valparaiso University and a Master of Business Administration degree from Indiana University. He has made previous public works presentations before the American Public Works Association (APWA) the World Environmental Forum Technical Exhibition Congress (WEFTEC), the Rapid Excavation & Tunneling Conference (RETC), and schools, universities and professional groups, including ASCE.
