The Gravity Train

It takes twenty hours from Los Angeles to Beijing, eighteen hours from India to Australia, twenty one hours from Canada to Malaysia. But imagine going from any part of the earth to the other in just under an hour.

Is it really possible?

Well, on paper, very much. But in practice it has certain difficulties to overcome.

Imagine a train without fuel and travels much faster than anything in the planet. Imagine a gravity train. Let a tunnel dug through the core of the earth joining any two antipodal points on its surface. Let somehow we can suck out all the air to a complete vacuum to avoid any kind of friction by the air. If a body, in this case a transport is built which will travel through that tunnel, then it will take just over 42mins to get to any other point on the earth. The body will freefall due to gravity. It will accelerate till the centre of the earth. Just after crossing the core it will travel against the force of gravity so it will decelerate and stop just at the surface of the earth reaching its other surface. To make it a little bit simple let us suppose that we throw a ball upwards. The ball attains a certain height before falling to our hands. It will reach the ground with the same velocity we threw it. The same happens with the gravity train but let straighten out the path followed by the ball...and that is what we get as a gravity train.

But there are certain difficulties in building a gravity train. Firstly, digging through the earths mass will get more difficult as we move towards the core as the rocks will harden and will rise in temperature. To overcome this problem, we have come with a solution, if the tunnel be built, not through the core but like a chord in the circle. Then the travel distance would shorten but the time will remain exactly the same. Longer the distance faster we go. Ultimately it will take 42mins and 12secs. Secondly, at the core in melting heat and enormous pressure it is extremely difficult to keep the heat out and the pressure down. Very little construction material is available for these purposes which are too expensive to be used. Thirdly, making the whole tunnel vacuum is almost impossible. Due to less pressure in the inside and crushing force outside the tunnel will be crushed.

If some how with some special method or with some ingenious ideas we can make this possible……may be we would be having our breakfast in LA and lunch in Tokyo.

   The nearer we move towards the core the faster we will get.