A RELIABLE CONVEYOR
MAINTENANCE SPECIALIST
MAINTENANCE SPECIALIST
On 1st June 2026, the tunnelling and infrastructure world celebrated the tenth anniversary of the construction of one of the most magnificent tunnels ever built, one only made possible through the use of advanced conveyor belt systems for earth and spoil moving.
The Gotthard Base Tunnel has been running for a decade, and its ambition and necessity have yet to be matched by any other completed tunnel project, with lessons it has provided at every stage of construction.
Everything from the establishment of tunnel boring machines to the establishment of advanced spoil transport was needed to quickly and safely move the unprecedented amounts of earth needed to enable a tunnel of this scale to be completed effectively.
To explain this often-unheralded part of one of the greatest infrastructure feats in human history, it is important to explore why the Gotthard Base Tunnel needed to be made, how it was constructed and why conveyor belts ensured that delays were minimised as much as possible.
The longest railway tunnel ever built as of 2026, the Gotthard Base Tunnel burrows underneath the Alps and connects the northern canton of Uri with the southern cantons of Ticino and Grisons, bypassing the existing winding mountain route.
A path through the Saint-Gotthard Massif, a major alpine mountain range that forms the Gotthard Pass, has been needed since the Middle Ages, connecting the northern and southern parts of Continental Europe.
Specifically, it has been historically necessary to link Germany with Italy, and the German and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland respectively. This is how the original Gotthard Pass earned its name “The King of Mountain Passes”.
However, as Europe became more industrialised, the winding alpine path was no longer enough, and more elaborate transportation and infrastructure projects were necessary to keep Europe moving.
The earliest and most influential of these was the Gotthard Rail Tunnel, one of the first ever major tunnel projects to use tunnel boring machines and the vast network of conveyor belts necessary to move the sheer amount of spoil a TBM grinds up in a day.
Whilst a deeply complex tunnel project that took over a decade to build, it was also completed to remarkable tolerances for an early tunnel project developed in the late 19th century on some of the most difficult and complex terrain yet encountered when constructing a tunnel.
The last two years of construction work purely involved removing excess spoil, a process that could have been completed exponentially quicker with a more modern conveyor belt system.
Alongside the rail tunnel, which became the core albeit congested way to travel across Switzerland for over a century, a road tunnel was eventually constructed in 1980 to make it possible to travel by road from the north of Europe to the south.
At the time, logistics were often highly affected by the winter seasons, so the solution to keep Europe moving was to construct what was at the time the world’s longest road tunnel. As of 2026, only six other road tunnels are longer.
However, with congestion on the existing railway tunnel and constant traffic jams on the road
tunnel, a much more ambitious solution was necessary, which involved defying what was believed to be possible with a tunnel construction project.
The Gotthard Base Tunnel took 17 years from its initial groundwork in 1999 to its completion in 2016, and given that it was the longest and deepest railway tunnel ever attempted, completing it to what were relatively tight timeframes required an innovative design and construction approach.
The first of these was to split the construction into four different stages, with a fifth added later:
Two of these access tunnels acted not only as potential multifunction stations in themselves (Sedrun and Faido) but allowed construction to be quadrupled (later quintupled) using highly advanced construction equipment and tunnel boring machines in order to complete the work as fast as possible.
Whilst the problems facing the Gotthard Base Tunnel were the same as those faced in 1882, the more advanced machinery and surveying allowed for the TBMs to efficiently make their way through varying kinds of rock, with blasting techniques finishing the job.
Because a mandated condition for building the project was to reuse as much of the earth and spoil excavated as possible, an efficient process was required to take the dirt to be processed in such a way that it could be repurposed safely and effectively.
This need for efficient excavation, ready for the materials to be reused, required the use of highly advanced, high-speed conveyor belt systems, something that is not given as much focus as the TBMs and other major tools used to bore the tunnels themselves.
There were multiple conveyor belt systems that became essential arteries to the construction that allow for the millions upon millions of tonnes of earth and spoil to be moved through the reuse process.
The first step of this is conveyor belt systems directly connected to the TBMs themselves, which bore into the earth and funnel the rock, dirt, sediment and other materials onto belts which carry them to discharge points along the construction path.
This system is designed to work in an uninterrupted way, with the conveyor belts automatically directing soil to the nearest loading point.
From there, the spoil is rerouted using other conveyor belt paths to various processing and sorting facilities, where the various constituent parts are separated, classified and assigned various roles in the construction process.
Some parts will be impossible to use and will end up at landfill, whilst others can be reused directly.
The material that lies somewhere in between this process will be recycled and prepared for further use later in the project.
The throughput of this system is significant, with a pack of 1,000 metric tonnes per hour across 12 kilometres of multi-stage conveyor belt, including incline sections to take into account the complex terrain found along the Alps.