The Michigan Department of Transportation has been asked to fund a feasibility study for a new high-speed train system that would link Detroit to Toledo and then the western border of Indiana near Chicago.

The request is revealed in emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Crain's that show MDOT officials corresponding with Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, a California-based organization looking to create an interconnected transit system across the country that would travel at speeds up to 760 mph.

At least one call between MDOT and Hyperloop has taken place in just the last couple weeks.

But how realistic is such a Jetsonian concept? At least in the near-term, not very, in spite of some baby steps forward in recent months.

HTT estimates that one mile of the supersonic system would cost $20 million to $45 million, putting it in the $6 billion to $13.5 billion price range for just a direct route from downtown Detroit to downtown Chicago. Calculating a Detroit-Toledo-western Indiana-Chicago route is more complex, depending on precise locations and routing.

"I think everybody is pretty amazed at kind of the audacity of (Elon Musk's) proposal," said Michael Kirk, principal of Detroit-based Neumann/Smith Architecture, which worked on train stations in Dearborn and Troy. Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, detailed the Hyperloop concept in a 58-page white paper in 2013; HTT and others like Hyperloop One have been working on similar proposals since then.

"I think technically, if he's talking truly about hyper-speed, 700 miles an hour, I don't think you would be doing that above ground in Michigan just because there would be too many issues with weather and movement of the track due to the freeze-thaw. A tunnel would be a far more stable environment."