The 'Gottardino,' stopped at Sedrun within the Gotthard Base Tunnel. (All photos by David Lassen)
An exhibit within the emergency tunnels at Sedrun.
On the train ride to Sedrun, Swiss Travel's Tabea Mandour is swarmed by media as she explains an aspect of construction.
The Gottardino 'Pioneer Passport.'
A 57-meter (187-foot) scale model of the Gotthard Base Tunnel at the Swiss Museum of Transport.
Today I walked around in the Gotthard Base Tunnel. In the very near future, Swiss Railways will hope no one has that opportunity.
Because, after November 27 of this year, the only time any passenger should alight in the world’s longest tunnel — a 57-kilometer (35.4-mile) bore under the Alps — is in an emergency.
For now, though, this very long hole through the mountains is a tourist attraction. Beginning in August, and concluding in November, it is possible, once a day in each direction, to take a two-hour trip from one side of the tunnel to the other, with a stop some 10 miles in at Sedrun, an emergency facility inside the tunnel.
Our tour group did this today — it was, in fact, the centerpiece of this four-day media tour — as passengers on the Gottardino, the tourist train with a very short shelf life. In December, when regular service through the tunnel begins — some 17 years after the start of construction — trains will pass through in 20 minutes, without stopping.
Sedrun, our stop, was supposed to be the only station within the tunnel — meant to serve ski areas in the mountains above — but the stop was eliminated when planners realized slowing and stopping would wipe out most of the hour that is gained by going through the mountain, rather than over the current Gotthard Pass.
But the space still exists, which gave the Swiss a perfect chance to show off their great engineering feat. Truth be told, the stop at Sedrun is not by itself particularly impressive. When you’re in the middle, a tunnel is pretty much just a tunnel.
But this one has been turned into an exhibit hall, with a gallery of people who were crucial to the tunnel’s construction and a wealth of information about how the tunnel was built, what it will mean (an hour shaved off the Zurich-Milan trip for passengers, and huge number of trucks taken off the road by improved freight service) and a wealth of figures that hint at the magnitude of the construction.
My favorite such statistic came from Swiss Travel System’s Tabea Mandour, the project manager for the base tunnel and its official expert. She told me today that if all the material excavated from the tunnel was placed in a single freight train, it would stretch from Zurich to Chicago.
The Gottardino does its best to play up the significance of the chance to visit. The narration makes much of the visitors being pioneers, and the “unforgettable experience” the visit entails. (I kidded Mandour, saying, “I didn’t know Swiss did hype.” She smiled and said, “We’re trying.”) Those who ride the Gottardino receive a “Pioneer passport;” the conductor stamps the train number and date on one page in lieu of the usual ticket collection, and inside the tunnel, there are stations to give the same page a passport-like stamp. They take the exclusivity of this passport seriously; as soon as the train was underway, staff came through and collected all the extras at unoccupied seats in our car.
The Swiss are justifiably proud of this project, which they voted to finance and will end up costing a little about 12.2 billion Swiss francs ($12.5 billion) — coming in on time and on budget. We began to receive a hint of that pride on Tuesday, when our tour group — slightly more than 30 of us, from all over the world — assembled in Lucerne. As a prelude to today’s trip, we had a brief tour of and dinner at the Swiss Transport Museum. The most visited museum in the country — with 800,000 guests per year in a nation of 8 million — it is truly an impressive place. We more or less sprinted through it; I hope to see it in greater detail sometime.
In the context of our tour, the most significant exhibit was a 1/1000th scale model of the Gotthard Base Tunnel, meaning model of the 57-kilometer tunnel is still 57 meters long. Somewhat frustratingly, it’s impossible to get it all in one photo; the one at right is the best I could do.
What I learned from the model is that the tunnel is not straight; it’s actually an S curve, allowing the tunnel crews to avoid certain areas with particularly difficult rocks. I also learned that, when the tunnel is in full operation, there will be 14 trains in it at any one time — two passenger trains and five freights in each direction. The model also shows each of the more than 70 types of rock encountered during the boring process (most of them are available to touch; a few are too soft to withstand handling) and showed the huge range of temperatures — from 53 to 118 degrees — encountered within the bore. The temperate changes reflect the distance under the surface and the type of rock.
At dinner, I had a chance to compliment the museum’s director, Martin Butikofer, on finding a way to scale the project to a size that is digestible, but still impressive. He was pleased.
“In this size, it’s ‘Wow,’ “ he said. “It was not an easy task, because we also stand for accuracy. That’s good, that you have that feeling.”
The museum also has a 15-meter cross section of the tunnel on display. The museum says this is a case of using the shortest tunnel in the world to help explain the longest tunnel in the world.
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