World's Longest and Deepest Rail Tunnel, Through Swiss Alps, Opens

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World’s Longest and Deepest Rail Tunnel, Through Swiss Alps, Opens

By SEWELL CHAN JUNE 1, 2016

World’s Longest Rail Tunnel Opens

Several European leaders attended the opening of the 35-mile-long Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland on Wednesday.

By REUTERS on Publish Date June 1, 2016.

LONDON — The world’s longest and deepest rail tunnel opened in Switzerland on Wednesday, nearly seven decades after it was first proposed and 17 years after construction began with a blast in the main shaft.

The 35-mile, or nearly 57-kilometer, twin-bore Gotthard Base Tunnel clears the way for a high-speed rail link under the Swiss Alps that the Swiss government says will revolutionize freight and passenger transportation.

The current four-hour trip between the economic hubs of Zurich and Milan will be cut by about an hour.

The ultimate goal is a seamless high-speed rail trip from the Dutch city of Rotterdam, Europe’s busiest port, in the north, to Genoa, on Italy’s Tyrrhenian Sea coast, in the south.

Violeta Bulc, the European Union’s transportation commissioner, attended the tunnel’s opening, calling the development “a milestone in European rail history and a major contribution of Switzerland to bringing Europe and Europeans closer together.”

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The $12.5 billion tunnel pushes the 33-mile Seikan rail tunnel in Japan, which connects the northern island of Hokkaido with the main island of Honshu, to second place on the list of longest rail tunnels, and the 31-mile Channel Tunnel, which links Britain and France, to third place.

By The New York Times

But the new world record might not last long: China has announced plans for a 76-mile link between the northern port cities of Dalian and Yantai, under the Bohai Strait.

Financing for the project — a package that includes sales and fuel taxes, road charges on heavy vehicles, and government loans — was approved by Swiss voters in a series of referendums.

For the Swiss, conquering the Alps — in this case, with a 1,345-foot boring machine, unlike the elephants used by the Carthaginian general Hannibal in one of his wars against Rome — is something of a national obsession.

The Gotthard has been a symbol of Swiss unity going back to the 13th century, and it was later the centerpiece of Switzerland’s plan of defense in case of an invasion by Nazi Germany, although that never happened. It was also the site of a 19th-century engineering feat in the Alps, a rail tunnel that opened in 1882 to great fanfare.

In 1879, The New York Times lauded that project as “adding another to the many records of man’s industry and ingenuity in subduing the mightiest obstacles which nature has interposed in the way of free communication between country and country.”

Another Times headline in 1880 reported “Mount St. Gothard Successfully Pierced,” and two years later, the newspaper heralded the “formal opening of the newest and best way into Italy.”

In 1947, the Swiss engineer Carl Eduard Gruner proposed a Gotthard base tunnel, between Amsteg and Bodio, but the route had to be altered several times for engineering reasons.

The final breakthrough, on a section between Sedrun and Faido, came in 2010. It took 125 workers in three shifts round-the-clock to install the concrete slab track on which the trains will run, with some sections as deep as 1.4 miles.

On Wednesday, religious leaders blessed the tunnel; a statue of St. Barbara, the patron saint of miners, stands inside it. Nine workers who died while building the tunnel were honored on Tuesday with a bronze plaque.

Five hundred passengers, selected from a lottery that 130,000 people entered, took part in the inaugural ride.

Among the leaders in attendance were the Swiss president, Johann Schneider-Ammann, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President François Hollande of France, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy, Prime Minister Adrian Hasler of Liechtenstein, and Chancellor Christian Kern of Austria.

After testing ends this year, around 260 freight trains and 65 passenger trains are expected to travel through the two-tube tunnel each day, reaching speeds approaching 100 miles an hour for freight and 125 miles an hour with passengers. Passenger trains are expected to eventually reach 155 miles an hour.

Goods currently carried by a million trucks a year will eventually be moved by trains instead.

New Swiss Tunnel to Speed Travel to and From Italy The 35-mile-long Gotthard Base Tunnel opens Wednesday amid concerns about border control

After nearly 20 years of construction, the world's longest rail tunnel opened in Switzerland Wednesday. The 35-mile Gotthard Basel Tunnel is a high-speed rail link under the Swiss Alps that will eventually help slash travel time between Zurich and Milan.

By John Letzing May 31, 2016 10:01 a.m. ET

ZURICH—Switzerland is poised to unveil a massive construction project in the heart of Europe that promises to more closely bind the continent, at a time when much of the public discourse has turned to tightening border controls and division.

The Gotthard Base Tunnel, scheduled to be opened Wednesday, has been burrowed beneath the site of a historic European crossroads in central Switzerland. The project required nearly 20 years of construction, and will result in the longest rail tunnel in the world—connecting the northern, German-speaking region of the country with the Italian speaking Swiss canton and points further the south.

The 35-mile tunnel should eventually help slash travel time between Zurich and Milan, and shuttle twice the roughly 9,000 people currently traveling between northern and southern Europe across the trans-Alpine route within the next decade, experts say. The amount of freight transported along the route is expected to increase to 260 trains daily from about 160.

European leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande, and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi are expected to join Swiss President Johann Schneider-Ammann at a gala opening celebration.

The event’s unifying symbolism seems somewhat out of step with the times, however. Switzerland and other European countries are now faced with a wave of populist unrest, with calls for tightened border controls amid rising numbers of refugees fleeing war and chaos in the Middle East.

Unlike its neighbors, Switzerland isn't a member of the European Union—though it is part of an agreement that allows for the free movement of people across European borders. A vote in Switzerland two years ago approving quotas on immigration from European Union countries may complicate that arrangement.

Meanwhile, several European countries have implemented more stringent border restrictions of late, and the U.K. is to hold a referendum next month on leaving the European Union entirely.

The Gotthard pass, beneath which the new tunnel has been built, has been a conduit for transit across Europe for centuries. An initial rail tunnel crossed the Alpine expanse in 1882, which also drew officials from across the continent for an opening celebration.

“It’s such a magic word for Switzerland,” Severin Rüegg, who is curating an exhibition for the Swiss National Museum on the Gotthard, said of the name; it evokes “a frontier between languages and cultures.” The new tunnel is a powerful symbol of unity and cooperation, Mr. Rüegg said, though he noted that for the project to truly fulfill its promise, additional tunnel and rail construction in Switzerland and Italy will be necessary for years to come.

Credit Suisse Group AG estimates the new tunnel cost 12.2 billion Swiss francs ($12.3 billion) to complete. While funding was raised through Swiss taxes and duties, its construction relied on workers from a mix of other countries including Italy and Germany.

Those countries actually accounted for the bulk of the funding for the original Gotthard rail tunnel, which opened in the 19th century and cost the equivalent of about 1.5 billion francs in today’s currency, Credit Suisse says.

Before the opening of that first tunnel, the steep, forbidding Gotthard pass was crossed using mules and then, by the early 19th century, via stagecoach. With German unification in 1871, historian Kilian Elsasser says Switzerland found itself surrounded by large countries and in need of a role. “It became a neutral transit point, a service to Europe,” Mr. Elsasser said.

Mr. Elsasser noted one possibly good omen for the new tunnel: unlike the opening event for the first Gotthard rail tunnel in the 19th century, which drew lesser lights from among Europe’s dignitaries, the event on Wednesday will feature “the bosses” from neighboring governments.

“Maybe it’s kind of nice to have a positive moment now, for the big countries in Europe,” he said.

‘The Gotthard is a symbol of openness to the world’

By Benno Tuchschmid, Aargauer Zeitung

May 28, 2016 - 17:00

The opening of the Gotthard rail tunnel in 1882. This picture shows the first Gotthard steam locomotive at Göschenen station on its return from Milan

Peter von Matt knows more about the Saint-Gotthard Massif than any other Swiss person. The author spoke to the Nordwestschweiz newspaper about the myths surrounding the Gotthard and about the Swiss urge to bore tunnels.

Von Matt, a writer and literary academic, has probably immersed himself in the Gotthard Pass more deeply than anyone else in Switzerland.

You call the Gotthard the ‘Swiss Sinai’. Why?

It is a part of the Swiss identity, and since the 18th century at the latest it has been a national symbol. In the 19th century, all the European nation states rushed to come up with national symbols that showed how unique they were and distinguished them from other countries.

The mountain is neither beautiful nor high. How did it become a Swiss myth?

It isn’t a mountain at all, it is a pass, a crossing. But even in the 18th century, the determining idea was that it is the origin of all the great currents pulsing through Europe; a heart from which the lifeblood streams to the entire continent.

Why was the Gotthard chosen as the location for the tunnel?

This tunnel through the Alps was a European project. Germany, Italy and Switzerland planned and funded it together. And it was also, fundamentally, a military project. Germany – or Prussia – was politically allied with Italy against France at that time. That’s why Bismarck, the Prussian prime minister and later the German chancellor, wanted a direct route to Italy.

What happened to the Prussian and Italian stakes in the tunnel?

A few decades later, Switzerland purchased the two other countries’ stakes. When the work was completed, all the labourers who had survived the tunnel’s construction received a coin with the three coats-of-arms of Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Underneath them is written in Latin: “With combined forces”. But we have carefully forgotten that we didn’t do it alone and that most of the labourers were Italian.

In your collection of essays, “The Calf in Front of the Gotthard Post,” you write: “the belief in progress combined with conservatism, a Janus-headed way of looking to the future and the past at the same time, is a Swiss characteristic in political and literary life.” Is the Gotthard a “myth” for the conservatives or the liberals?

I hate the word myth in a political context. It has become a junk word for everything. The Gotthard as a pass and the Gotthard as a tunnel system are two national symbols of quite different types. Politicians with a tendency to pathos still evoke the pass as Switzerland’s heart. The tunnel system, on the other hand, is the showpiece of Swiss technological history. In that sense, it embodies Switzerland’s drive for progress but also the drive for European cooperation from an early age.

How do you mean?

Switzerland has only survived through history because the great powers didn’t want to cede the Alpine passes to each other and therefore wanted Switzerland to guard these passes, which had to remain open to everyone. That was the great powers’ main interest in our country from the time of Napoleon through the Vienna Congress until the age of Bismarck.

Switzerland always knew this and carried out this task carefully, in the interest of self-protection. Even Hitler could use the Gotthard route until the very end to transport sealed cargo. Everything about the Gotthard is in a sense a cluster of symbols from which anyone can help himself to suit his theories.

The Gotthard was also the core of the Swiss National Redoubt. Switzerland drilled itself into the Gotthard.

The Redoubt was a military strategy developed by General Guisan that is still controversial today, but it can’t simply be declared wrong-headed in retrospect. The general knew that Switzerland could only be defended for a very short time at its national borders, but that if the Alps were conquered, the passes would be unusable for a long time. All the bridges in the Alpine region were mined. He couldn’t prevent Germany and Italy from joining forces to conquer Switzerland, but he could set things up so that it wouldn’t be worthwhile for them to do it.

This was a risky game, above all because Hitler’s decisions were often irrational. But because Germany also needed the Swiss banks – and needed Switzerland as an international espionage centre, as a place for secret political meetings and as a weapons supplier – we got away with it in the end. So that drilling was a factor in our survival.

Where does Switzerland’s notorious urge to bore tunnels come from?

Every culture – its technology and its art – is shaped by the geography of its terrain. Where there are mountains, there are also rock-faces and ravines, so you have to bore tunnels and build bridges.

Bridges? But in Switzerland we celebrate tunnels.

Bridges and bridge-building technology are just as important to our cultural history as tunnels. For centuries, the Gotthard presented a bridge-building challenge rather than a tunnel-boring challenge. That lives on in the saga of the Devil’s Bridge, and it can still be seen in the Schöllenen Gorge.

We mustn’t forget Swiss bridge-builders just because we are celebrating the tunnel-borers. Swiss bridge-builders have left their mark around the world. The fact that the Gotthard is an example both for tunnel- and bridge-building shows once more the extent to which it accumulates symbolic importance.

If everyone can find something in this accumulation of symbols, then the Gotthard must really have core significance for Switzerland.

We have to be careful not to declare the Gotthard the only political and technological occurrence in Switzerland. The pass is not a particularly old one. The most important Swiss passes were originally opened and used by the Romans, in Graubünden and Valais; the passes of Grimsel, Furka and Brünig. Our culture comes from the Romans. The Germanic tribes simply invented the trousers and brewed beer. We are much more Roman than we are Germanic or Alemannic.

How can you tell?

The Romans brought to this country wine-growing, road-building, houses with walls, tiled roofs, Roman law, grammar and highly developed technology. Even cheese is Roman; we can tell from the word.

The Basel cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt coined the term “accelerated processes” at the time of the construction of the first Gotthard tunnel in 1872. Today we would translate that as globalisation. Did the Gotthard lend impetus to globalisation?

As soon as we set aside the urge to think only in the present and stop seeing everything from the Swiss perspective, we see clearly that ever since it first opened, the Gotthard pass has provided a major means of communication within Europe. It was a trade route to Italy, an exit route for thousands and thousands of Swiss mercenaries and a gateway to let in Italian culture and the humanist spirit.

Farmers in central Switzerland have traded with Lombardy and Piedmont since time immemorial, just as the French-speaking Swiss traded with Burgundy and France, and the people of Zurich traded with Alsace and southern Germany. The Gotthard was and is a significant link between Switzerland and the rest of the world. It is a symbol of our openness to the world.

What does the Gotthard mean to you personally?

I was a soldier in a mountain-defence battalion and most of my exercises took place in the Gotthard region. That’s why I have an objective view of the area. When you have marched for days and nights over the scree – and have often had to drink out of every puddle to avoid dying of thirst because the best army in the world couldn’t provide drinking water for its soldiers – then you see the sublime mountain world in a somewhat different light.

I would never stand on the Gotthard and deliver a speech about the heart of Switzerland. Going up there to pontificate at some celebration is something for people who live in nice villas and look at the Alps from a distance.