Elon Musk’s Boring Company digs into a plan for tunnel from Baltimore to D.C.

Alan Boyle
Updated
Tunnel boring machine
The tunnel boring machine nicknamed “Godot” sits in a below-ground chamber. Elon Musk reportedly acquired the pre-owned machine from L.A. Metro. (Elon Musk via Instagram)

One of billionaire Elon Musk’s lesser-known ventures is taking the spotlight with word that The Boring Company is planning to dig a rapid-transit tunnel between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

That’s not all: Musk says the company is putting the finishing touches on a second tunneling machine, which will be nicknamed Line-Storm as a tribute to a Robert Frost poem. The first machine is named Godot, after the Samuel Beckett play. It’s being employed to dig a tunnel in Hawthorne, Calif., where Musk’s SpaceX rocket venture is headquartered.

Musk is even selling Boring Company hats. More than 6,400 of them, at last report.

In June, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla estimated that he spent only about 2 percent of his working time on The Boring Company, which focuses on lowering the cost of tunneling to facilitate high-speed underground transit. He must have saved up a lot of that time for this week.

The Baltimore-Washington project is the most intriguing development: This week, a Reddit user posted pictures showing a fenced-off area south of Baltimore, with The Boring Company’s logo emblazoned on the fence.

Electrek picked up on the pictures and passed them along, even though they were deleted from the Reddit forum. They appear to show a staging site for a tunnel entrance.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan tweeted out confirmation of The Boring Company’s involvement, and said the project was part of a plan to “bring rapid electric transportation to MD – connecting Baltimore City to D.C.”