Gotthard Base Tunnel

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The Gotthard Base Tunnel is a railway tunnel under construction in Switzerland. With a planned length of 57 km (35 miles) and a total of 153.5 km (95 miles) of tunnels, shafts and passages planned, it will be the longest railway tunnel in the world upon completion, ahead of the current longest, the Seikan Tunnel. The project is designed to feature two separate tunnels containing one track each.

Image:Nrla scheme.png

The route over or though the Gotthard Pass is one of the most important, if not the most important, passages through the Alps in Europe. Traffic in the existing road and rail tunnels is at its limits. In order for a faster and flatter passage through the Alps from north to south and vice versa, the Swiss have decided to build this tunnel cutting through the Gotthard massif at nearly ground level, 600 metres below the existing railway tunnel. On the existing track, only limited freight trains with a maximum weight of 2,000 tons using two or three locomotives are able to pass through the narrow mountain valleys and through spiral tunnels climbing up to the portals of the old tunnel at a height of 1,100 meters above sea level. Once the new tunnel is completed, standard freight trains of up to 4,000 tons will be able to pass this natural barrier as easily as if the Alps did not exist. Because of the ever increasing international truck traffic, the idea is to transport trucks and freight containers from southern Germany to northern Italy and vice versa by train to relieve the already overused roads (the so called 'Rolling Highway', Rollende Landstrasse - ROLA). Passenger trains on the other hand will be able to travel as fast as 250 km/h (155 mph) passing through the new tunnels.

There is also a proposal to build a station in mid-tunnel, Porta Alpina, near Sedrun, which will connect to the Rhaetian Railway/Matterhorn-Gotthard-Bahn east-west rail route via local buses to Sedrun and Disentis stations; access to Porta Alpina would be via an already existing access tunnel which is 1 kilometre long and elevator shafts 800 metres deep.

The two portals will be near the villages of Erstfeld, Canton Uri and Bodio, Canton Ticino.

Completion is projected for 2015. The tunnel is part of the Swiss AlpTransit project, also known as 'New Railway Link through the Alps NRLA' which also includes the Lötschberg Base Tunnel between the cantons of Berne and Valais. Like the Lötschberg tunnel, it is intended to bypass winding mountain routes and establish a direct route suitable for high speed rail and heavy freight trains. On completion it is expected to decrease the current 3.5 hours travel time from Zürich to Milan by one hour.

Nearby are two more St. Gotthard Tunnels: the 1882 railway tunnel and the 1980 road tunnel.

1 Construction
2 Construction Progress
3 See also
4 External links

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Construction

Responsible for the construction is the AlpTransit Gotthard Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Swiss Federal Railways (SFR). In order to decrease the construction time by half, four access tunnels were built so that the construction of the tunnel can start at four (finally five) different sites at the same time (Erstfeld, Amsteg, Sedrun, Faido and Bodio).

It was decided to build a tunnel system with two single-track tunnels. The two rail tunnels are joined approximately every 325 metres by connecting galleries. Trains can change tunnels in the two multifunction stations at Sedrun and Faido. These stations also house ventilation equipment and technical infrastructure - and serve as well as two emergency stop stations.

The access to the construction site (and later multifunction station) Sedrun is quite difficult. It is only reachable by a one kilometer long flat access tunnel, where at the end two 800 m long shafts lead straight down to the tunnel level. There are projects to extend this multifunction station to an official train stop called Porta Alpina.

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Construction Progress

Image:CH Gotthard Basistunnel Amsteg 1.jpg In July 2004, 52.338 km (34.1%) of the total 153.4 km passages and tunnels were dug.
By the end of June 2005, 74.589 km (48.6%) had been dug.
By the 1 April 2006, 90.8 km (59.1%) had been dug.

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