Thats more for Russia’s benefit since I doubt they could afford that many fuel trucks to bring gas down with them. Once you get into Canada, there is a huge gap till the next reliable fuel station. Russia would be horrified about having a land bridge connecting , the American corp of engineers would have a four lane super highway built and connected to Moscow.
One option would be the Dobbertin Surface Orbiter (Official Site). It surfaced in the early 1990s with an outrageous plan to circumnavigate the globe. It made a splash in the custom car world for a while but never seemed to do very much. Still, you might be able to drive and float your way there although I doubt this design would be very good at dealing with rough, snowy terrain.
There was a road race in 1908 that went from NYC to Paris going west. The organizers intended for the cars to drive across a frozen Bering Strait, but gave up the idea and just shipped the cars to Japan and then to Vladivostok. Three of the six cars starting finished the race.
I doubt there were any concerns from anybody with military experience. Some people might have whipped up hysteria about the Soviets driving to America but it would have been a ridiculous idea. Any Red Army troops would have been so far along a razor-thin supply line that we would hardly have needed to fight them to eliminate them.
If the Soviets had ever wanted to invade America, they would have done it the traditional way; invade by sea and seize a major port to secure a supply line.
If you considered a ferry to be acceptable component of the trip… nope. I’ve actually looked from time to time, and there aren’t any automotive ferries that cross the Atlantic If you started in Iceland, I think you could get your car to mainland Europe, from which you could drive that way to Russia.
There aren’t any ferries across the Pacific, either.
Beyond that, I leave the discussion up to everyone who points out that you’d have a lot of difficulty trying a trans-polar route.
I met someone who rode a Honda Gold Wing from Japan, across Russia, into Scandinavia, so all that part is “no problem”. For the around-the-world tour you would most likely need to book passage on an actual freighter rather than a “ferry”, though.
If you’re Lynne Cox, you could swim it.
China.
It would immediately become a major trade route between China and Canada and the US. Remember that the Earth is an oblate sphere and great circle routes apply.
You’re vastly underestimating the population of Siberia and the Russian Far East. As someone who’s recently visited there myself, I can confirm that it has plenty of quite sizeable, modern cities (say, between half a million and a million inhabitants each). The tunnel would also link major population centres in China and Korea (also much closer than Moscow).
Maybe not for most passenger transportation, but a freight railway might be more economical or more environmentally friendly than air or sea transport.
I also seam to recall that part of the justification of a connection across the Bering sea is that it could also support a natural gas pipeline transporting Russian fuel to North American consumers. I have no clue if this is viable, only that the thought was being floated about.
A freight railway to where? The closest railheads to the strait appear to be in Nizhny Bestyakh and Fort Nelson, which are more than 3000 miles apart, across terrain that is less than ideal for heavy construction.
Sure, for a rail line you have the same problem as with a road as described above.
China. Imagine a line going from Harbin to Vancouver and onward into the US. You’d have manufactured goods going one way and food the other.
A co-worker once decided to travel the Alaska highway. This was many years ago, (my parents even did a stretch in the late 1950’s) but the highway is still legendary for sharp gravel which eats tires. plus, there’s not a lot of amenities along the way. Plus, it goes to one part of Alaska, but Google maps shows 500 miles from the nearest roadway to the narrow part of the strait; and construction over northern terrain is not trivial. It’s 2000 miles from Edmonton, the nearest decent city in driving distance. (Since Anchorage is a dead end) On the other side, the nearest road on Google maps is Seymchan, over 1100 miles from the strait. then, another 1300 miles to the Chinese border, even further to Vladivostok.
OTOH, there is a proposal recently floated to build a pair of bridges, 5 miles and 39 miles, that would connect Russia via one of its islands to Japan. So if someone could devise a feasible and reasonably cheap extreme speed transport the connections are there. But driving 4500 miles to get from Edmonton to Harbin or Vladivostok is probably better classified as an adventure, not a road trip, even if a drivable road is constructed. 4500mi at 60mph is 75 hours. Most existing northern roads don’t easily allow for 60mph.
If there were a 500mph ground transport available (maglev or hyperloop, say), that would be a 9-hour drive, not much worse than a flight; and if it was a point-to-point transport, you could beat time taken with flights and changing planes and go from city center to city center.
With decent, reliable speed, such a link might provide the same or better service than air freight - being less constricted by load weight or weather, and offering far more timely delivery than ships.
I’m sorry but that’s not really relevant for a rail line.
This analysis of shipping costs by rail or sea for a continental-US route, came back with the response that the sea route was cheaper, even though it was more than twice as long.
If that’s got even vague generalisability, I find it hard to see how a new rail route over some of the most difficult terrain in the world could ever be competitive with existing shipping methods
I had a lot of fun on IMDB when Revolution was on the air arguing a British character was a quitter for not walking from the East coast to England to see her family.
IIRC now deceased American political outlier Lyndon Larouche used to push a bridge over the Bering Strait as part of a “new Silk Road” that would spark the world economy, and in many ways he was right. But there are so many logistical problems here:
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The Bering Straight is one of the most dangerous and unknown and remote bodies of water on the planet. What guarantee is there we can just place piles in it and build a bridge and everything will be safe? And who is in charge of the land bridge? How is security handled?
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I don’t know about Alaska but just go on YouTube and you’ll see how unpassable Russian roads are in Siberian summer. Where will the money and promises come from to pave these thousands of miles of highways to hell appropriately to accommodate American and Canadian trucks? And will we come through with a 1000 mile to Fairbanks?
As I said, there’s no reason we can’t put our heads together and come up with a reason two countries 2 miles apart cannot build a link. The problem is the link is located in HELL.
That’s rather a biased source, don’t you think?
A bridge is a non-starter; a tunnel is the way to go. And security is a solved problem: look at the Channel Tunnel.
Again, a road link is a non-starter. It would be a rail link.