7 ms·

Gotthard Base Tunnel

97 points by lelf 11y ago

tunafishman 11y ago
Another awesomely engineered route to avoid the Teufelsbrücke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsbr%C3%BCcke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsbr%C3%BCcke
DiabloD3 11y ago
I remember when they started this project. This is seriously maybe the greatest work of engineering on Earth. Now only if the US can match this and finally get that bullet train network up and running...
- abduhl 11y ago
  Why is this "seriously maybe the greatest work of engineering on Earth"? It looks like straight forward rock tunneling to me. The alps have good rock that the industry has a lot of experience mining through. Don't get me wrong, the length is impressive but the diameter (10m) is not crazy nor is the ground bad.
  - SeoxyS 11y ago
    What makes this project incredible is how it is dug at the base of the mountain, instead of higher up. That makes it the deepest tunnel, dug under 2,500m of rock at its max. When you have almost two miles of mountain weighing down on you… pressure is intense. The rock has different compositions along the way, some parts have to be dug with boring machines, some parts with explosives. The project has been in construction for 20 years. For comparison: the Golden Gate Bridge took 4 years. The Hoover Dam, 5 years. The Burj Khalifa, 5 years.
    - jo909 11y ago
      There are deeper mines than that. The long time the project is taking is also an indicator that it is mostly about repeating a certain set of tasks over and over and over again. Certainly there were big challenges, but I imagine they were more of a project planning and management nature than pure engineering problems. It is quite impressive nontheless.
    - abduhl 11y ago
      Two miles of mountain does not "weigh down on you". As I said earlier, the alps are known to have very good rock. What this means is that it is, essentially, self supporting. You are not designing for two miles of overburden pressure, you are designing for maybe a couple diameter's worth of overburden. If you read my comment history you'll realize that I work in the tunneling industry. I have designed, inspected, or helped construct large diameter hard rock tunnels, small diameter soil tunnels, and everything in between.
    - hueving 11y ago
      Those are bad comparisons (at least the dam and the bridge) because projects of that scale would be nowhere near that fast in the US because of environmental impact studies, NIMBYism, and just improved safety conditions of the labor itself (tons of people died in the construction of the dam).
    - eps 11y ago
      > The project has been in construction for 20 years. And, as impressive, it's still on schedule and on budget.
legulere 11y ago
> it will be the world's longest and deepest traffic tunnel yet the linked list of the worlds longest tunnels lists two longer metro tunnels in china
- jessriedel 11y ago
  Hmm. Maybe they're drawing a distinction between metro/subway and normal (freight) trains?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Someone 11y ago
  That list also mentions a "Longest railway tunnel excluding urban metro lines with intermediate stations", so I would guess it is in that category. Makes some sense; a metro tunnel with stations every kilometer or so will not feel like a single tunnel, even if it was engineered as one.
dgorges 11y ago
Gotthard Tunnel The Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT) is a railway tunnel through the Alps in Switzerland expected to open on 2 June 2016. - Length: 35.4 mi - Cost: $10.3 billion - Construction: 1996 - 2016 (est) Bay Bridge The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge (known locally as the Bay Bridge) is a complex of bridges spanning San Francisco Bay in California. - Length: 4.46 miles - Cost: $6.5 billion - Construction: 2002 - 2013 (est)
- Swizec 11y ago
  How does average construction worker pay in Bay Area compare to Germany/Switzerland?
  - trhway 11y ago
    while i'm sure the issue with the costs here and there isn't labor/salary, googled out of curiosity - for welder in US it is $30-50K/year avg, in Germany - the government mandated minimum in non-East Germany is something like 14euro/hour, in the East - 11 euro/hour. I also would be very surprised if the Germany/Switzerland were "outsourcing" the job to Chinese companies like the US does with big infrastructure projects. I mean everybody who ever dealt with outsourcing up close knows what in reality it is completely opposite to "cost savings", instead it is a way to "digest" even more money than it would be otherwise.
    - abduhl 11y ago
      The minimum wage that can be paid for a tunnel hand in San Francisco is around $34/hr plus overtime and benefits. See http://www.dir.ca.gov/oprl/pwd/Determinations/Northern/NC-023-102-11.pdf http://www.dir.ca.gov/oprl/pwd/Determinations/Northern/NC-02... You have to remember that tunnel jobs are almost always run by a municipality which means that they're almost always union. I would imagine it is similar in Switzerland. Tunneling is a niche industry and commands a high price.
      - masterleep 11y ago
        We don't know that, because the government is controlling the price.
ohitsdom 11y ago
I think self-driving vehicles will make projects like this even rarer. The two benefits this project achieves are: 1. Safer travel on rails instead of trucks (accidents & environmental) 2. Faster transport between regions (saving 1 - 1.5 hrs) Safety will become almost a non-concern with self driving cars. Work still needs to be done to minimize environmental impact, but electric cars are coming on strong. Faster transport times will be a tougher sell when we are actually free to be productive when traveling. With an automated driving system, vehicles become offices/lounges. Self driving cars don't completely address these concerns, but they make the $10 billion price tag hard to justify. I'm not saying this project isn't justified, I just love examining the impact self-operating vehicles will have on our future.
- syncsynchalt 11y ago
  Not so much in this particular case — the purpose of the tunnel is to reduce heavy truck traffic through environmentally sensitive areas. The tunnel is explicitly built to satisfy a goal of transforming truck freight to rail freight. The fast passenger time is only listed as a side benefit.
  - abalone 11y ago
    Not to mention electric is not viable for long haul heavy trucking (for the foreseeable future).
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      It kind of depends on how you envison that. With existing intermodal systems, there's already something somewhat resembling electrified long-haul heavy trucking, though largely in Europe. For various reasons, the US has little electrified freight, and doesn't forsee it for the forseable future, though it's clearly technically feasible. There are several other possibilities for electrified freight, though battery-EV is almost certainly out of the picture. IIRC BMW have experimented with a battery-powered EV tractor-trailer, but it's used exclusively for local delivery at low speeds (~40 kph IIRC) at a range of ~5-10 km. A very limited pilot. Self-driving cargo vehicles capable of "training" on highways, with catenary or similar feeds, could offer long-haul separable vehicle cargo capacity. I'm not aware of any serious plans for such a system though, and it would require both massive investment in vehicles and roadways. Present planning at the US EIA is for natural gas fueled cargo -- both truck and rail.
thom_nic 11y ago
TFA doesn't mention whether or how far the project is over budget or behind its original schedule. Does that mean it is on schedule and on budget? If so that's amazing. I'm used to constantly hearing stories like the "Big Dig" here in the US, sometimes it seems like every non-trivial civil works project fails massively fail on both criteria.
- piquadrat 11y ago
  Originally, the cost of the complete AlpTransit project (of which the Gotthard is part of) was estimated to be about 14.5 billion Swiss Francs (CHF), in 1998. It ended up costing about 18.7 billion CHF, so quite a bit more. The whole project changed quite a bit in the mean time, though (e.g. added security and environmental measures). source (in German): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Eisenbahn-Alpentransversale#Gesamtkosten https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Eisenbahn-Alpentransversa...
  - Swizec 11y ago
    That's only 30% over budget. Coming from a country where civil projects are often used to "vanish" money, I am very impressed. Also coming from software engineering. 30% over budget is just impressive. I would love to be capable of such accurate planning.
- bosdev 11y ago
  The shocking thing to me is that they are completing the project AHEAD of schedule!
- yrochat 11y ago
  "The new Alpine railroad (NLFA) will cost 300M CHF less than planned, because the digging and concreting of the Gothard tunnel have cost less than expected. The final bill is expected to be between 23 and 23.5 billions CHF instead of 24 millions CHF." http://www.letemps.ch/suisse/2015/04/02/nouvelle-ligne-ferroviaire-gothard-coutera-300-millions http://www.letemps.ch/suisse/2015/04/02/nouvelle-ligne-ferro...
scmoore 11y ago
There's a (kind of cheesy) documentary about the construction of the tunnel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaTN_R1b00I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaTN_R1b00I I skipped through some of the slower-paced sections, and mostly just gawked at the machinery.
- TrevorJ 11y ago
  Thanks for the link. Cheesy or no, I love these kinds of docs, wish there were more of them out there.
morsch 11y ago
Another very long trans-alpine railway tunnel in construction 250 km to the east: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel It's nowhere near completion, though. Length: 34 mi Cost: $11.5 billion Construction: 2007 - 2025 (est)
phantom784 11y ago
Originally, there was going to be a station partway through the tunnel. It would've been 800 meters underground - the deepest in the world. It was scrapped as uneconomical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porta_Alpina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porta_Alpina
- Animats 11y ago
  The station was actually built, but only as an emergency facility and to help with construction. It's reachable from the surface, but requires a horizontal trip on a mine train and then 800m vertical on a mine hoist. Stopping trains there interferes with traffic too much.
miander 11y ago
It looks like the trains through this tunnel will be all-electric. I wonder why they went with a 15kV power system instead of a modern 25kV system? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_kV_AC_railway_electrification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_kV_AC_railway_electrificati... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25_kV_AC_railway_electrification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25_kV_AC_railway_electrificati...
- hn9780470248775 11y ago
  Perhaps for compatibility with the rest of the Swiss rail network?
  - miander 11y ago
    You're right. There don't appear to be any 25 kV rail systems in Switzerland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_systems_for_electric_rail_traction#15_kV_AC.2C_16.C2.A02.E2.81.843.C2.A0Hz_.2816.7_Hz.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_systems_for_el...
cozzyd 11y ago
I've sometimes wondered if a Reno to somewhere in western Sierras base tunnel would make sense in the US. Probably not nearly as much of a bottleneck to justify.
peterburkimsher 11y ago
The software control SCADA system for the Gotthard Base Tunnel is called WinCC OA, made by ETM Siemens. Full disclosure: I did a summer job for them in Eisenstadt, Austria in 2012, and my dad uses the same software at CERN. ETM made software called PVSS, and it was renamed to WinCC OA when ETM got bought by Siemens. The previous Siemens software, WinCC, was the victim of the Stuxnet worm. Hopefully ETM's is a bit more secure! This is public knowledge, not insider information: http://www.etm.at/index_e.asp?sname=div_nw_0209_gbt_e.asp http://www.etm.at/index_e.asp?sname=div_nw_0209_gbt_e.asp

97 points by lelf 11y ago

Another awesomely engineered route to avoid the Teufelsbrücke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsbr%C3%BCcke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsbr%C3%BCcke

DiabloD3 11y ago

I remember when they started this project. This is seriously maybe the greatest work of engineering on Earth. Now only if the US can match this and finally get that bullet train network up and running...

abduhl 11y ago
Why is this "seriously maybe the greatest work of engineering on Earth"? It looks like straight forward rock tunneling to me. The alps have good rock that the industry has a lot of experience mining through. Don't get me wrong, the length is impressive but the diameter (10m) is not crazy nor is the ground bad.
- SeoxyS 11y ago
  What makes this project incredible is how it is dug at the base of the mountain, instead of higher up. That makes it the deepest tunnel, dug under 2,500m of rock at its max. When you have almost two miles of mountain weighing down on you… pressure is intense. The rock has different compositions along the way, some parts have to be dug with boring machines, some parts with explosives. The project has been in construction for 20 years. For comparison: the Golden Gate Bridge took 4 years. The Hoover Dam, 5 years. The Burj Khalifa, 5 years.
  - jo909 11y ago
    There are deeper mines than that. The long time the project is taking is also an indicator that it is mostly about repeating a certain set of tasks over and over and over again. Certainly there were big challenges, but I imagine they were more of a project planning and management nature than pure engineering problems. It is quite impressive nontheless.
  - abduhl 11y ago
    Two miles of mountain does not "weigh down on you". As I said earlier, the alps are known to have very good rock. What this means is that it is, essentially, self supporting. You are not designing for two miles of overburden pressure, you are designing for maybe a couple diameter's worth of overburden. If you read my comment history you'll realize that I work in the tunneling industry. I have designed, inspected, or helped construct large diameter hard rock tunnels, small diameter soil tunnels, and everything in between.
  - hueving 11y ago
    Those are bad comparisons (at least the dam and the bridge) because projects of that scale would be nowhere near that fast in the US because of environmental impact studies, NIMBYism, and just improved safety conditions of the labor itself (tons of people died in the construction of the dam).
  - eps 11y ago
    > The project has been in construction for 20 years. And, as impressive, it's still on schedule and on budget.

legulere 11y ago

> it will be the world's longest and deepest traffic tunnel yet the linked list of the worlds longest tunnels lists two longer metro tunnels in china

jessriedel 11y ago
Hmm. Maybe they're drawing a distinction between metro/subway and normal (freight) trains?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Someone 11y ago
That list also mentions a "Longest railway tunnel excluding urban metro lines with intermediate stations", so I would guess it is in that category. Makes some sense; a metro tunnel with stations every kilometer or so will not feel like a single tunnel, even if it was engineered as one.

dgorges 11y ago

Gotthard Tunnel The Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT) is a railway tunnel through the Alps in Switzerland expected to open on 2 June 2016. - Length: 35.4 mi - Cost: $10.3 billion - Construction: 1996 - 2016 (est) Bay Bridge The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge (known locally as the Bay Bridge) is a complex of bridges spanning San Francisco Bay in California. - Length: 4.46 miles - Cost: $6.5 billion - Construction: 2002 - 2013 (est)

Swizec 11y ago
How does average construction worker pay in Bay Area compare to Germany/Switzerland?
- trhway 11y ago
  while i'm sure the issue with the costs here and there isn't labor/salary, googled out of curiosity - for welder in US it is $30-50K/year avg, in Germany - the government mandated minimum in non-East Germany is something like 14euro/hour, in the East - 11 euro/hour. I also would be very surprised if the Germany/Switzerland were "outsourcing" the job to Chinese companies like the US does with big infrastructure projects. I mean everybody who ever dealt with outsourcing up close knows what in reality it is completely opposite to "cost savings", instead it is a way to "digest" even more money than it would be otherwise.
  - abduhl 11y ago
    The minimum wage that can be paid for a tunnel hand in San Francisco is around $34/hr plus overtime and benefits. See http://www.dir.ca.gov/oprl/pwd/Determinations/Northern/NC-023-102-11.pdf http://www.dir.ca.gov/oprl/pwd/Determinations/Northern/NC-02... You have to remember that tunnel jobs are almost always run by a municipality which means that they're almost always union. I would imagine it is similar in Switzerland. Tunneling is a niche industry and commands a high price.
    - masterleep 11y ago
      We don't know that, because the government is controlling the price.

ohitsdom 11y ago

I think self-driving vehicles will make projects like this even rarer. The two benefits this project achieves are: 1. Safer travel on rails instead of trucks (accidents & environmental) 2. Faster transport between regions (saving 1 - 1.5 hrs) Safety will become almost a non-concern with self driving cars. Work still needs to be done to minimize environmental impact, but electric cars are coming on strong. Faster transport times will be a tougher sell when we are actually free to be productive when traveling. With an automated driving system, vehicles become offices/lounges. Self driving cars don't completely address these concerns, but they make the $10 billion price tag hard to justify. I'm not saying this project isn't justified, I just love examining the impact self-operating vehicles will have on our future.

syncsynchalt 11y ago
Not so much in this particular case — the purpose of the tunnel is to reduce heavy truck traffic through environmentally sensitive areas. The tunnel is explicitly built to satisfy a goal of transforming truck freight to rail freight. The fast passenger time is only listed as a side benefit.
- abalone 11y ago
  Not to mention electric is not viable for long haul heavy trucking (for the foreseeable future).
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    It kind of depends on how you envison that. With existing intermodal systems, there's already something somewhat resembling electrified long-haul heavy trucking, though largely in Europe. For various reasons, the US has little electrified freight, and doesn't forsee it for the forseable future, though it's clearly technically feasible. There are several other possibilities for electrified freight, though battery-EV is almost certainly out of the picture. IIRC BMW have experimented with a battery-powered EV tractor-trailer, but it's used exclusively for local delivery at low speeds (~40 kph IIRC) at a range of ~5-10 km. A very limited pilot. Self-driving cargo vehicles capable of "training" on highways, with catenary or similar feeds, could offer long-haul separable vehicle cargo capacity. I'm not aware of any serious plans for such a system though, and it would require both massive investment in vehicles and roadways. Present planning at the US EIA is for natural gas fueled cargo -- both truck and rail.

thom_nic 11y ago

TFA doesn't mention whether or how far the project is over budget or behind its original schedule. Does that mean it is on schedule and on budget? If so that's amazing. I'm used to constantly hearing stories like the "Big Dig" here in the US, sometimes it seems like every non-trivial civil works project fails massively fail on both criteria.

piquadrat 11y ago
Originally, the cost of the complete AlpTransit project (of which the Gotthard is part of) was estimated to be about 14.5 billion Swiss Francs (CHF), in 1998. It ended up costing about 18.7 billion CHF, so quite a bit more. The whole project changed quite a bit in the mean time, though (e.g. added security and environmental measures). source (in German): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Eisenbahn-Alpentransversale#Gesamtkosten https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Eisenbahn-Alpentransversa...
- Swizec 11y ago
  That's only 30% over budget. Coming from a country where civil projects are often used to "vanish" money, I am very impressed. Also coming from software engineering. 30% over budget is just impressive. I would love to be capable of such accurate planning.
bosdev 11y ago
The shocking thing to me is that they are completing the project AHEAD of schedule!
yrochat 11y ago
"The new Alpine railroad (NLFA) will cost 300M CHF less than planned, because the digging and concreting of the Gothard tunnel have cost less than expected. The final bill is expected to be between 23 and 23.5 billions CHF instead of 24 millions CHF." http://www.letemps.ch/suisse/2015/04/02/nouvelle-ligne-ferroviaire-gothard-coutera-300-millions http://www.letemps.ch/suisse/2015/04/02/nouvelle-ligne-ferro...

scmoore 11y ago

There's a (kind of cheesy) documentary about the construction of the tunnel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaTN_R1b00I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaTN_R1b00I I skipped through some of the slower-paced sections, and mostly just gawked at the machinery.

TrevorJ 11y ago
Thanks for the link. Cheesy or no, I love these kinds of docs, wish there were more of them out there.

morsch 11y ago

Another very long trans-alpine railway tunnel in construction 250 km to the east: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel It's nowhere near completion, though. Length: 34 mi Cost: $11.5 billion Construction: 2007 - 2025 (est)

phantom784 11y ago

Originally, there was going to be a station partway through the tunnel. It would've been 800 meters underground - the deepest in the world. It was scrapped as uneconomical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porta_Alpina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porta_Alpina

Animats 11y ago
The station was actually built, but only as an emergency facility and to help with construction. It's reachable from the surface, but requires a horizontal trip on a mine train and then 800m vertical on a mine hoist. Stopping trains there interferes with traffic too much.

miander 11y ago

It looks like the trains through this tunnel will be all-electric. I wonder why they went with a 15kV power system instead of a modern 25kV system? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_kV_AC_railway_electrification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_kV_AC_railway_electrificati... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25_kV_AC_railway_electrification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25_kV_AC_railway_electrificati...

hn9780470248775 11y ago
Perhaps for compatibility with the rest of the Swiss rail network?
- miander 11y ago
  You're right. There don't appear to be any 25 kV rail systems in Switzerland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_systems_for_electric_rail_traction#15_kV_AC.2C_16.C2.A02.E2.81.843.C2.A0Hz_.2816.7_Hz.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_systems_for_el...

cozzyd 11y ago

I've sometimes wondered if a Reno to somewhere in western Sierras base tunnel would make sense in the US. Probably not nearly as much of a bottleneck to justify.

peterburkimsher 11y ago

The software control SCADA system for the Gotthard Base Tunnel is called WinCC OA, made by ETM Siemens. Full disclosure: I did a summer job for them in Eisenstadt, Austria in 2012, and my dad uses the same software at CERN. ETM made software called PVSS, and it was renamed to WinCC OA when ETM got bought by Siemens. The previous Siemens software, WinCC, was the victim of the Stuxnet worm. Hopefully ETM's is a bit more secure! This is public knowledge, not insider information: http://www.etm.at/index_e.asp?sname=div_nw_0209_gbt_e.asp http://www.etm.at/index_e.asp?sname=div_nw_0209_gbt_e.asp