SUBMARINE TUNNEL

Evening Star, Issue 22458, 1 October 1936, Page 14

SUBMARINE TUNNEL

A JAPANESE PROJECT Ringed about Japan’s Inland Sea, the swarming islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, and the southern end of Honshu dot the teeming waters like so many human ant heaps. Too far apart to be linked successfully by bridges, they have for years presented a knotty problem to engineers. For’ travel by water has become hazardous. Through narrow Shimonoseki Strait, gateway to the Japanese and Yellow Seas between Kyushu and Honshu, 1,500 vessels pass daily. Tootling tugs, pot-bellied ferries, and dodging! furtive “ sampans ” slither across the Frapire’s aquatic cross-roads from morning to night, transferring their passengers and freight from one inland to the other. The congestion is picturesque, but dangerous. Nearly half the water accidents of Japan occur here. Recently Japanese engineers began boring preliminary shafts for a vehicular and railroad tunnel beneath the strait. It will be 3,600 ft long, about 60ft deep—the first undersea tunnel over attempted. RIVER STRUCTURES. Just 111 years ago British engineers started the world’s first under-water tunnel, boring beneath the sluggish Thames. The drilling took 20 years, owing to inexperience and the hazards of the task. Tunnels under rivers have since become .fairly common. The longest and most " recently completed is in England, under the Mersey River, opened two years ago by the 'ate King George V. It is more than two miles long. A vehicular tunnel at Detroit is 2,200 ft long. The Holland Vehicular Tunnel under the Hudson River at New York is 9,250 ft from entrance to exit.