Every major infrastructure project has a big reason behind the planning, design, millions of work hours and intense conveyor belt infrastructure that gets resources to the worksite and waste away, but the largest projects often have an origin story behind their creation.
The Channel Tunnel is an excellent example of this; there had been plans to build such a tunnel for over a century but a mix of technological constraints, political strife and both the direct and indirect effects of two World Wars halted the idea until the 1980s.
This means that any large tunnel project has an interesting story behind it that spans far beyond the initial construction period, and in the case of the longest railway tunnel in the world, that story spans over 800 years.
Centuries In The Making
The Gotthard Base Tunnel is the longest and deepest railway tunnel in the world, with the only transport links longer than it all being metro lines.
At over 35 miles long with a maximum depth of over 8,000 ft under the Alps, the construction of the tunnel was a considerable challenge only matched by the sheer necessity of such an undertaking.
The Gotthard, known as the King of Mountain Passes is one of the most important transport routes in Europe and despite its difficulty has been so important to trade and transport that crossings began as early as the 12th century.
The initial route, the Gotthard Pass, is the lowest point between the two Alpine peaks of Pizzo Lucendro and Pizzo Centrale and connects Genoa in Italy to Rotterdam in the Netherlands by way of Basel in Switzerland.
Whilst known for thousands of years, the route was only made possible thanks to a wooden bridge built across Schollenen Gorge, which became so important that it led to the founding of the Old Swiss Confederacy.
It was not an ideal transport route, being essentially a bridle path that involved treacherous conditions across mountainsides that could be particularly dangerous in winter, particularly since several parts of the path consisted of wooden ledges attached to the rock wall.
However, its importance to trade and transport meant that it was of constant importance to the Holy Roman Empire, and would receive a stone bridge known as Devil’s Bridge in the late 16th century and the first road tunnel in the Alps in 1707.
The first real road across the whole of the Gotthard Pass was only constructed in 1830, and in 1882 the then-longest transport tunnel in the Alps was constructed in the form of the Gotthard Railway Tunnel, which cut a dangerous journey that took days to a comfortable one that took hours.
The Gotthard Road Tunnel in 1980, itself the longest road tunnel in the world at the time, cut these journey times further, but its strategic importance in an increasingly unified Europe meant that by 2013 the tunnel was at capacity and needed to be duplicated.
Both routes are dependent on avalanche protection equipment, meaning that it is possible that a vital artery to Europe could be blocked over the winter.
A solution to this is an ambitious tunnel that goes directly under the Alps, which would allow for larger, heavier trains to travel across the Alps than would be possible using the historic rail route with its steep valleys and spiral tunnels.
The proposal was suggested as early as 1947, but all Swiss legal proposals are subject to referendum, which means that voters need to approve the decision to build such an ambitious and expensive tunnel.
This would come to pass through two successful votes in 1992 and 1994 to shift as much freight from trucks to trains, primarily through the use of rolling highways and shipping container transportation.
Three additional votes were needed to allow the tunnel to exist as it was, although one of these was controversially undertaken not as a referendum but as a parliamentary session, in order to build a fifth base tunnel which would be excavated primarily by blasting rather than TBMs
It was a huge prospect that required 12 years of construction from initial groundwork to its official opening, and were it not for an innovative construction approach it could have taken even longer.
The tunnel was started at five separate sites (Erstfeld, Amsteg, Sedrun, Faido and Bodio) and constructed using separate access tunnels and TBM machines in order to expedite the project.
The final breakthrough took place in 2011, the first traversal of the tunnel was in 2013 and after three years of testing it opened in earnest.
