The passengers included German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Francois Hollande and Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi.
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Tunnel nerds, rejoice. The Swiss are today celebrating the opening of the world’s largest underground passage to mark its completion 17 years after construction began.
The new tunnel will help people travel through the area more quickly – cutting 45 minutes off the journey across Sweden – as well as easing the heavy traffic that can gather there. (Reuters) Journalists stand in front of mock gates of the NEAT Gotthard Base Tunnel.
Authorities intend to conduct additional 3,000 tests in the Gotthard base tunnel before opening it to normal operation in December this year.
The federal rail service projects a boom in rail travel in the coming years, including a surge in daily passengers from the current 9,000 people to 15,000 by 2020.
Its trajectory will be flat and straight instead of winding up through the mountains like the old rail tunnel and a road tunnel opened in 1980.
The bumpy road from Gruner’s initial idea to the official start of construction in 1999 included bureaucratic delays and concern over the project’s financial viability.
Switzerland pulled out all the stops for Wednesday’s inauguration.
The Gotthard Base Tunnel may not be the longest railway tunnel in the world as there are longer tunnels on the Beijing and Guangzhou metros, but it has a much larger diameter than a metro tunnel to cope with high-cube container and high-corner-height piggyback freight trains and it is undoubtedly one of the world’s great feats of railway engineering.
Gotthard Base Tunnel was constructed for 10 billion euros by a consortium, which also includes one subsidiary of Turkey’s Renaissance Construction in the country, Heitkamp Swiss.
Under purple neon lights, performers dressed in orange miners’ suits and protective helmets danced atop a moving rail auto, while others in skimpy outfits feigned wrestling and trapeze artists hung from chains or ropes.
The ambitious venture was largely made possible by technical advances in tunnel-boring machines, which replaced the costly and risky blast-and-drill method.
It cut through rock and threw the debris backwards while simultaneously placing the preformed segments of concrete that formed the shape of the tunnel.
A separate system then bonds the pieces together.
When it officially opens, the Gotthard will surpass Japan’s 53.9-kilometre Seikan tunnel as the world’s longest train tunnel.
The 50-km link, which opened in 1994, means that London and Paris are less than three hours apart by high-speed rail – a closeness that has woven many ties in business, tourism and culture. At 12:18 pm the first two trains from each portal set off on their journey through the tunnel.
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The tunnel connects Erstfeld with Bodio and will see 325 trains per day run through it, of which 260 will be 160-km/h (99-mph) freight trains and 65 will be 200-km/h (124-mph) passenger trains.
