Thousands of feet beneath the Swiss Alps, a massive engineering project years in the making is reaching its final stages after a huge new tunnel was opened.
The Ceneri Base Tunnel, just short of 25 miles in length, is the final section of a new high-speed, high-capacity railway that plunges deep under the mountains of Europe in an effort to drastically reduce transport times across the continent.
Excavation of the two 35-mile running tunnels was completed in 2011 and employed a combination of traditional drilling/blasting and massive tunnel boring machines with 32-foot diameter cutting faces and miles of conveyor belts to carry rock away for recycling. This 9.5-mile-long CBT eliminates the remaining"mountain" section of the busiest north-south route between the economic powerhouses of northern Europe and northern Italy.Journey times for international travelers between Zurich and Milan will be slashed to just two and a half hours, compared with four hours via the old Gotthard route, with passenger trains traveling at up to 125 miles per hour through the tunnels.
Heading south, the journey remains much the same, skirting the lakes of Zurich and Zug, passing the home of the world-famous Swiss Army knives at Schwyz before sweeping along the eastern shore of Lake Luzern -- known locally as the Vierwaldstaettersee -- towards Altdorf, the home of William Tell and the northern portal of the base tunnel.
The major beneficiaries of the new tunnel are freight companies which will gain more capacity, lower costs and shorter journey times on this key trans-European axis -- and the Alpine communities along the old line who have been blighted by the noise of heavy rail traffic for decades. GBT is part of a wider project, officially known as Neue Eisenbahn Alpentransversale or New Trans-Alpine Railways, to provide flatter, high capacity rail links between Northern Europe and Italy.
Neighboring Austria also finds itself in a strategic location between Europe's industrial giants and has embarked on a similarly ambitious program of tunnel building to liberate its Alpine valleys from heavy freight traffic. Tens of billions of dollars are being invested in base tunnels and massive upgrades of the main rail routes linking them to Germany and Italy.
Construction projects of this magnitude are not without their critics or difficulties, though. All these new tunnels look set to be delivered later than planned and cost significantly more than their original budgets.
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