The world's longest rail tunnel, 36 miles under the Alps, from Zurich (in north east Switzerland) under the St. Gotthard massif to Milan in northern Italy will open in 2015 or 2016 — five or six years late — and will cost about $2 billion more than the $10.7 billion that Swiss voters approved.

The Gotthard tunnel is even tougher because it has more mountain above it than any other in the world — a 7,500-foot-high mass of rock. Also Engineers were held up repeatedly because of fault lines

A shorter tunnel, the 21-mile Loetschberg, is being dug to link Bern, the capital, (in mid west Switzerland) to Milan. It's on course for completion in 2007.

These two tunnels should prove a boon to Milan and Northern Italy.

THE WORLD
ALPINE TRAIN TREKS SEEK LOW ROAD

Tunnels linking Italy and Switzerland will speed up rail journeys.
But drilling through the Alps isn't as easy as the Swiss expected. 

Los Angeles Times 
By Bradley S. Klapper,
Associated Press Writer
December 26, 2004

GENEVA — In a few years, train passengers will vanish into a tunnel just south of Zurich and emerge 30 minutes later blinking in southern European sunshine. They'll have missed the Alpine views but shortened their journey to Italy by half.

With mega-projects such as this, the increasingly borderless Europe is knitting itself together by busting through ancient physical barriers — a tunnel from England to France, a Scandinavian bridge that makes it possible to drive from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean and, soon, 36 miles under the Alps, the world's longest rail tunnel.

Not as soon as hoped, though. The drilling is going slower than forecast, meaning that the tunnel under the St. Gotthard massif to Milan in northern Italy will open in 2015 or 2016 — five or six years late — and will cost about $2 billion more than the $10.7 billion that Swiss voters were told when they approved the dig in a 1992 referendum.

A shorter tunnel, the 21-mile Loetschberg, is being dug to link Bern, the capital, to Milan. It's on course for completion in 2007, the Transport Ministry says.

But for the Swiss, proud of their reputation for efficiently handling both time and money, the delay in drilling the Gotthard is a bit of an embarrassment.

"Geological difficulties are the main cause for the rising costs and delay," said Davide Demichele, Transport Ministry spokesman. "It is normal with tunnel projects that you cannot always tell exactly where problems lie."

The Gotthard tunnel is even tougher because it has more mountain above it than any other in the world — a 7,500-foot-high mass of rock. Engineers have had to stop repeatedly because of fault lines as well as heat and dust churned up by the weight of mountain pressing down on drilling equipment.

Last year, for instance, engineers found an unexpected fault line near the tunnel's southern end. Steel arches were used to buttress the rock while drilling proceeded more slowly, and a planned maintenance point had to be moved to another area.

This problem alone set work back by a year. Attempts to speed the tunneling machines have so far failed to make up for lost time or cut costs. "If there is a problem, then we have to solve it, but it is much more expensive when these come as surprises," Demichele said.

For the Swiss, the Gotthard and Loetschberg tunnels can't come soon enough. With the Iron Curtain gone and the European Union expanding, truck traffic across the Alps grew more than tenfold between 1980 and 1998, while rail freight rose just 37%, according to AlpTransit Gotthard AG, the company that is managing the whole project.

The Swiss, who aren't in the EU, have tired of traffic jams caused by big rigs and vacationers. The government has promised to halve the number of trucks on the road, and the new tunnels, carrying trucks as well as passengers, look like the ideal solution. The Gotthard will halve travel between Zurich and Milan to two hours and 10 minutes. The Bern-Milan route through the Loetschberg tunnel will be shorter by an hour and take the same time as Zurich-Milan.

By running at low elevation, the tunnels are something like mouse holes at floor level, able to accommodate trains and cargo loads that cannot negotiate the long climb and switchbacks to existing tunnels nearly 2,000 feet higher. Freight trains will be able to more than double their speeds, exceeding 100 mph. Passenger trains will be able to exceed 150 mph.

A grandiose plan still on the drawing boards is the Porta Alpina underground station, which would be the world's deepest. Halfway between Zurich and Milan, an elevator would lift passengers 2,600 feet up through Alpine rock to give them a view of the beautiful Surselva Valley and return them underground to catch a later train.

But there's no money yet. A study put the cost between $33 million and $42 million.

"The construction is possible," AlpTransit spokesman Ruedi Suter said. "But we need someone willing to order it and pay for it."

Alpine Train Treks Seek Low Road
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