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World's Longest, Deepest Rail Tunnel Opens In Switzerland (latimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: More than 2,200 years after the commander from the ancient North African civilization of Carthage led his army of elephants and troops over Europe's highest mountain chain, the Swiss have completed another gargantuan task: burrowing the world's longest railway tunnel under the Swiss Alps to improve European trade and travel. European dignitaries on Wednesday inaugurated the 35.4-mile Gotthard Railway Tunnel, a major engineering achievement deep under the Alps' snow-capped peaks. It took 17 years to build at a cost of 12.2 billion Swiss francs ($12 billion) -- but workers kept to a key Swiss tradition and brought the massive project in on time and on budget. It also bores deeper than any other tunnel, running about 1.4 miles underground at its maximum depth. The thoroughfare aims to cut travel times, ease roadway traffic and reduce the air pollution spewed from trucks traveling between Europe's north and south. Set to open for commercial service in December, the two-way tunnel can handle up to 260 freight trains and 65 passenger trains per day.
... not only because they did it "on budget and in time", which can only mean they didn't go for the cheapest bidder, but also because it's trains going through the tunnel, only!
Had this been done in proper US-style, that tunnel would have no place for trains, but one lane reserved to military vehicles and the cars of VIP ticket holders, then another lane for ordinary cars, on which a permanent traffic jam would take you 2 hours mininum to pass the tunnel, if only because of the mandatory TSA strip searching before entering.
At first I wasn't clear on how the tunnel would reduce pollution. Won't the bad gases just come out of the tunnel? But of course, the idea is the tunnel will shift cargo transport from trucks to trains. Presumably trains produce less pollution. Or at least less trash littering the "pristine Swiss landscape"
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A freight train can carry 10,000 tons, a 747 cargo plane can carry 140.
You could run 260 trains or 18,000 planes, which is going to be cheaper?
why spend all that money for a tunnel when you can simply fly over the mountains?
One primary use for the tunnel is to keep freight off the autobahn, but because it's a base tunnel, running straight under the Alps, it will allow bullet passenger trains to rip right through from Germany to Italy in half an hour. The old Gotthard Tunnel was the big engineering accomplishment of a century ago, punching through a high pass over the Alps, but it still required that trains spiral up into the mountains to the tunnel entrance, and then spiral down into the valley on the other side.
'Base tunnels' of this type are being built to replace the other long-distance tunnels through high Alpine passes. It will mean that European rail will go from being way ahead of American rail to being ludicrously far ahead of American rail.