The Largest Tunnel

The Largest Tunnel - Gotthard Base

       After 14 years of construction and about $ 10 billion in investments, both ends of the world's longest tunnel under the Swiss Alps, is found.

        Every day, 3,000 trucks crossing the Alps. The Swiss want the traffic is underground and rail.

        To this end, the tunnel opened, named Gotthard Base, 57 km long. Completely flat, it will allow trains to reach speeds up to 240 km / h.

        The material removed from excavations to build the longest tunnel in the world could build five pyramids of Egypt.

         The travel time between Zurich and Milan will fall from the current four hours to two hours.There will be a train station inside the mountain. It tourists from around the world can disembark and climb a dizzying 800 meters express elevator built into the rock to reach the ski resorts Sedrun.

        Eight men died in the building that was nearly abandoned in the face of a dangerous instability in the rocks. The first trains should only pass through the building in 2017.

          The Gotthard Base Tunnel is actually two parallel tunnels leading measure a record of 57 km each, served by a maze of access tunnels, shafts and passages. In total, will be 153.5 km of tunnels through the Swiss Alps.

      The project was designed to solve the problem of European heavy traffic on this important route through the Alps, while simultaneously developing the rail network in Europe at high speed.

        The existing tunnel, much higher, can only handle freight trains three trucks up to 2,000 tons. The new tunnel will be 4,000 ton freight trains heavy - trucks carrying across the board - effortlessly through the heart of the mountains. The passenger trains will be able to travel at speeds up to 250kmph, resulting in a journey time by train between Zurich and Milan, just two hours and 40 minutes - a third less than at present.

             But dig a tunnel under the mountains of 3000 meters will have all the skill of some of the best engineers in the world. Much of the geology that lies beneath the region was unknown when the project began. Problems that would delay the project and give rise to complex engineering challenges have been a feature of the construction of the tunnel.

            The expected completion date is 2015, but that may well slip. In fact, in July 2005, a tunnel boring machine (TBM), known as Gobi II, was arrested when he unexpectedly found a point of rock, soft unstable. The tunnel collapsed quickly in front of the TBM cutter head - and there is no such thing as reverse with a tunnel boring machine.