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| Tunneling Under The Alps Extreme Engineering |
Tunneling Under The Alps
Extreme EngineeringNational Geographic | Technology | Tunnel
April 30, 2003
Country: Switzerland
Project: Gotthard Base Tunnel
In Switzerland, engineers have embarked on one of the boldest most extreme engineering project in history, a tunnel on the scale of so gigantic. No one has dare to attempt anything like it before. Over 35 miles long, the longest tunnel in the world will cut through the heart of the Swiss Alps. The risky plan to redirect the crush of Europe's traffic in cargo not over the Alps but under them. To do this miners have to punch their way through some of the hardest rock on earth. It will take the largest drilling machines on this plan. Each more than 3 stories high and longer than 4 football fields, drilling 24 hours a day for 6 years to get the job done.
The project is incredibly dangerous and of breaches expensive. The price is 7 billion dollars. Can it be done? or unforeseen problem bankrupt the project before it's finished? Will engineers be able to avoid the horrible fate of so many other time, fire, disaster and death?
Project: Gotthard Base Tunnel
In Switzerland, engineers have embarked on one of the boldest most extreme engineering project in history, a tunnel on the scale of so gigantic. No one has dare to attempt anything like it before. Over 35 miles long, the longest tunnel in the world will cut through the heart of the Swiss Alps. The risky plan to redirect the crush of Europe's traffic in cargo not over the Alps but under them. To do this miners have to punch their way through some of the hardest rock on earth. It will take the largest drilling machines on this plan. Each more than 3 stories high and longer than 4 football fields, drilling 24 hours a day for 6 years to get the job done.
The project is incredibly dangerous and of breaches expensive. The price is 7 billion dollars. Can it be done? or unforeseen problem bankrupt the project before it's finished? Will engineers be able to avoid the horrible fate of so many other time, fire, disaster and death?
The Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT) is a railway tunnel in the heart of the Swiss Alps expected to open in 2016. With a route length of 57 km (35.4 mi) and a total of 151.84 km (94.3 mi) of tunnels, shafts and passages, it is the world's longest rail tunnel, surpassing the Seikan Tunnel in Japan.
Its main purpose is to increase total transport capacity across the Alps, especially for freight, notably between Germany and Italy, and more particularly to shift freight volumes from road to rail to reduce environmental damage caused by ever-increasing numbers of heavy lorries. A secondary benefit will be to cut the journey time for passenger trains from Zürich to Milan by about an hour and from Zürich to Lugano to 1-hour 40 minutes.
The project consists of two single-track tunnels. It is part of the AlpTransit project, also known as the New Railway Link through the Alps (NRLA), which includes the Lötschberg Base Tunnel between the cantons of Bern and Valais and the under construction Ceneri Base Tunnel (scheduled to open late 2019) to the south. It bypasses the Gotthardbahn, a winding mountain route opened in 1882 across the Saint-Gotthard Massif, which is now operating at capacity, and establishes a direct route usable by high-speed rail and heavy freight trains.
The total cost of the project is 9.8 billion Swiss francs, or US$10.3 billion. When completed, the Gotthard Base Tunnel will be one of the longest tunnel construction projects in the world: 20 years of constant construction and preparation.
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