Elon Musk says he’ll enter competition for O’Hare express train

The city is issuing a call for interested parties to build and run an express train to O’Hare International Airport.

Well, entrepreneur Elon Musk said he’s interested.

Musk, the man behind the Tesla electric car company, SpaceX and other ventures, retweeted a Chicago Sun-Times story on the design competition and added: “The Boring Company will compete to fund, build & operate a high-speed Loop” from O’Hare to downtown.

Wednesday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel brought reporters to an unfinished rail station below the Block 37 retail/office/residential development in the Loop and noted that it is still a viable option for anchoring the Loop-to-O’Hare service.

The Boring Company is one of Musk’s ventures. According to the company website, it was started to build “Fast to dig, low cost tunnels” with the goal being to “solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic” through a “large network of tunnels many levels deep” below cities.

Those tunnels would be used for what the company calls “Loop” and which it describes thus: “Loop is a high-speed underground public transportation system in which passengers are transported on autonomous electric skates traveling at 125-150 miles per hour. Electric skates will carry either 8-12 people or one car.”

Earlier this year, Emanuel had sent a team of aides to meet with Musk in California to discuss high-speed rail technology. Musk is employing Jetsons-like technology to build a subterranean mass transit system in tunnels beneath Los Angeles County.

“The opportunity for Chicago is endless and boundless,” Emanuel said in June. “It would be a tremendous investment, job creator and economic engine for the city that would pay dividends for decades ahead,” Emanuel said. “They are very interested. And we’re gonna have `em now out to the city to explore further what we are doing and planning to see whether the tunnel approach is an alternative to the ones we’ve been discussing.”