£5 Notes

[bluemoon1]

There was a letter in the Daily Mail today re the HS2 rail route that said a billion £5 notes piled up would reach a staggering 63 miles high. Can anybody verify this fact, before I start repeating it to my mates in the pub.

Many thanks

[Bazile]

What does it matter if it's correct or not ?

Stories told in a pub are usually tall ones , anyway :-)

[aelmpvw]

whether it's true or not i'm not impressed

[FredPuli43]

Hang on. I'll just nip downstairs with a tape measure.

[TWR]

Correct.

[Old_Geezer]

Are fivers a particular thickness ?

63 miles = 3991680"
/ 1,000,000,000 = about 4 thou. Could be true. How thick is a sheet of paper ? I'd suspect about that.

[aelmpvw]

surely it couldn't be 63 miles exactly?

[ABerrant]

Banknote paper is around 0.11 mm thick.

1bn notes of 0.11 mm stacked would be around 110 km high ~ 68 miles.

So somewhere around 60-70 miles is a reasonable estimate.

[aelmpvw]

i rest my case

[ABerrant]

^ a reasonable estimate of an unreasonable occurrence

[bert_h]

4 thou looks about right, Old Geezer. That would make 500 of them about two inches thick, while a pack of 500 sheets of regular paper is about an inch and a half.

[doctordb]

But as the stack got higher would the weight compress the notes below, thereby requiring more notes than estimated?

[stewey]

Another question is what would be the length of them if they were placed side by side?

[bluemoon1]

Thank you all for your replies, the comical and the genuine. I knew I'd get the answer here.
I agree doctordb but as it is a hyperthetical question I think we can ignore that fact