Switzerland is to open the Gotthard Base Tunnel on Wednesday after 17 years of boring, drilling and carving through solid rock on the foot of the Alps.
As the first flat low-level route through the mountains, the tunnel is also the world’s longest and deepest with a route length of 57 km and just less than 152 km of tunnels, shafts and passages.
Unlike its predecessor, the Gotthard railway which was completed in 1882, the new line will run on a flat low-level route -- the first of its kind in the Alps -- and reduce the travel time for trains travelling through the mountain.
"We will have four tracks because we will have a new tunnel, and still the old tunnel will be kept in operation. So you can easily say that we are doubling the capacity for the cross-Alpine transportation. But on top of that, we're also increasing the speed so that we are cutting the traveling time. So we will be more competitive vis-a-vis the road transportation," said Libor Lochman, the executive director of the Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies.
The builders said the project will help shift freight volumes from road to rail in the region so as to reduce environmental damage caused by ever-increasing numbers of heavy lorries and protect the living environment for the residents in the area.
"It's a project for environmental protection, which means that we have to protect people [who] are living in this area of the Alps, and we have to reduce emissions -- for example, noise and also pollution. And we want to protect the Alps as a whole refuge. We can reach this goal by moving transportation of goods from road to rail," said Renzo Simoni, chief executive officer of AlpTransit Gotthard Ltd.
"We have an interest in protecting our Alpine mountains [and] the people who live there. So therefore transport on railways is more eco-friendly than transportation on roads," said Doris Leuthard, head of the Swiss Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications.
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