Zurich/Milan (gro) From next Sunday, it goes at speed 200 in the world’s longest tunnel through the Alps. This will bring Central and Southern Europe closer together. 57 kilometers long is the new Gotthard base tunnel. It took 17 years to build and 12 billion Swiss francs to build the longest underground tube in the world. Once everything is finished, travel time from the north side of the Alps to Italy will be cut by over an hour. And Sicily can then be reached in a day by land, thanks to the new Alpine crossing and the new high-speed trains in Italy.
Comfortably in just under 4 hours to Milan.
Today, the comfortable train ride from Zurich to Milan takes on average a little more than five hours; in the future, four hours will be enough at all times and soon even half an hour less. Thus, a day trip to Milan with extensive shopping through the “Golden Triangle” between Cathedral Square, via Montenapoleone and Sfortezza will be even easier for Zurich or Bern. And if you take an early train from Zurich, you can reach Messina and Catania in Sicily, more than 2000 kilometers away, before midnight.
260 freight trains and 50 passenger trains per day.
With the approval for the operation of the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) has been approved on Monday this week to 11 December the scheduled operation through the tunnel. Per day, reports the Swiss news agency (sda), starting next Sunday, “around 50 passenger trains as well as up to 260 freight trains would be able to travel through the tunnel.”
Alpine transversal to be complete by 2020.
According to sda, up to 2,400 people have been working on various NEAT construction sites for the Gotthard tunnel. The tunnel has to cope with “practically no gradient”; the so-called flat track thus allows longer trains, fewer locomotives and shorter travel times in freight traffic. The shortening of travel times in passenger traffic, however, would only be “gradually noticeable”. The complete “Gotthard axis” is “expected to be completed in 2020 with the commissioning of the Ceneri Base Tunnel,” SBB continues. By 2020, around twenty tunnels from Basel to Chiasso will also be adapted to the new technologies and equipment standards.