There is only one (big) problem: Germany didn't start building some of the essentials train tracks between Austria and Scandinavia, France, Belgium and the Netherlands yet. They are going to be delayed at least 10-20 years, not finished before 2040 or 2050.
Thanks to the strong German car and truck industry, politicians are still delaying rail track constructions. Germany's strategy for the last 25 years was to move a lot of transit and also passenger traffic from the rail to the road (car industry again). Now they have mostly traffic jams and not a lot of working train infrastructure left.
Building new train tracks still takes at least a decade.
Usually you need one decade to properly plan the route (it's hugely political were the track runs exactly, next to village A or village B? get all the legal stuff done, move a few people out of their houses and find replacements for them, dispossess the fields from farmers, geological examination, drawing the plans, and much more).
And then you need another decade to actually build it. Germany is highly populated, so you need to build a lot of tunnels under or close to villages to protect them of the train noise.
For this tunnel planning was started in 1996, construction started in 2008, and it will be finished in 2032. So 36 years in total.
I agree. It's actually quite clever, because technically it's correct - it does enable a rail link between Scandanavia/Italy. But your average user is going to see the headline, think "WHAT? Surely that's not right, let's just click and see what they mean..."
The project creates quite a bit of dug-out material, so much that you can get paid quite a lot if you can take a few hundred thousand m³.
I know a farmer that used this to fill up a small, steep valley with nothing much in there, and then create a field on-top they can use for herding animals, growing hay while being relatively easy to access (a good chunk of farms in South Tyrol are quite steep to begin with). With the money they get from taking over excavation material they can not only pay the work for creating that field, but even turn a small net-even.
Communes, Province and the State do not easily allow such things though, IIRC helping geological safety (think mud slide, avalanche avoidance) there was a key point of accepting the project (but I got no hard source on that, sorry).
It's a very cool project. Currently it's a pretty big detour to cross the alps. The company I'm working for actually provides the planning software for the "Brenner Base Tunnel".
Quite the detour, especially the turn towards Gossensaß that's only done to gain the altitude slowly enough, to not need yet another train engine for pulling freight over the Brennerpass; currently they're using two and also have an exception that allows to pull more power from the track grid than normally allowed by law/regulation.
Rail wise it's planned that this tunnel shaves off an hour of travel time between the two provincial capitals Bozen and Innsbruck, which would be quite welcomed by myself; traveling between Vienna and South Tyrol quite a few times by train.
Out of interest, is this software specially programmed for the job or is it a general geological/tunneling planing suite? Also, what company would that be (if you don't mind sharing)?
It is located in the German speaking part of Italy called South Tyrol. There have never been a lot of Italian speaking inhabitants in this region, and the Italian names of the towns have been given by Italian fascists. So people living there don't like them very much.
Franzensfeste was chosen by fascists as well, according to the Italian Wikipedia page. The previous name was Mezzaselva all'Isarco/Mittewald am Eisack.
Italian people used to be the majority (~60% in the '60s) down to ~40% now, which is still a significant number.
Oh it's a railway tunnel, all the better it seems from an ecological perspective.
> The Brenner Pass, in the Alps at the border between Austria and Italy, is one of the most important traffic connections between northern and southern Europe, and the motorway going over it is infamous for its frequent traffic jams. Pollution from transit traffic is a major concern..
> The goal is to relieve this situation by greatly improving the railway connection between North Tyrol and South Tyrol with the new tunnel, which will allow trains to cross the Alps much faster. The tunnel is scheduled to be completed in 2032.
Austria and Italy signed the agreement to build the tunnel in April 2003, so it's been a long time coming.. In 2017, the cost estimate was 7.8 billion Euro (~8.5b USD).
There’s already the Gotthard Base Tunnel, but since Italy and Germany didn’t build out their part of the railway infrastructure to connect it, it remains underused for freight traffic.
Readit News
Thanks to the strong German car and truck industry, politicians are still delaying rail track constructions. Germany's strategy for the last 25 years was to move a lot of transit and also passenger traffic from the rail to the road (car industry again). Now they have mostly traffic jams and not a lot of working train infrastructure left.
Usually you need one decade to properly plan the route (it's hugely political were the track runs exactly, next to village A or village B? get all the legal stuff done, move a few people out of their houses and find replacements for them, dispossess the fields from farmers, geological examination, drawing the plans, and much more).
And then you need another decade to actually build it. Germany is highly populated, so you need to build a lot of tunnels under or close to villages to protect them of the train noise.
For this tunnel planning was started in 1996, construction started in 2008, and it will be finished in 2032. So 36 years in total.
[1] https://basementgeographer.com/the-longest-train-ride-in-the...
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6n8I1UDTKP1IWjQMg6_TwA
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30983269
I know a farmer that used this to fill up a small, steep valley with nothing much in there, and then create a field on-top they can use for herding animals, growing hay while being relatively easy to access (a good chunk of farms in South Tyrol are quite steep to begin with). With the money they get from taking over excavation material they can not only pay the work for creating that field, but even turn a small net-even.
Communes, Province and the State do not easily allow such things though, IIRC helping geological safety (think mud slide, avalanche avoidance) there was a key point of accepting the project (but I got no hard source on that, sorry).
Rail wise it's planned that this tunnel shaves off an hour of travel time between the two provincial capitals Bozen and Innsbruck, which would be quite welcomed by myself; traveling between Vienna and South Tyrol quite a few times by train.
Out of interest, is this software specially programmed for the job or is it a general geological/tunneling planing suite? Also, what company would that be (if you don't mind sharing)?
Here's an article about the software and the job (it's in German tho): https://www.nevaris.com/warum-nevaris/referenzen/brenner-bas...
It is located in the German speaking part of Italy called South Tyrol. There have never been a lot of Italian speaking inhabitants in this region, and the Italian names of the towns have been given by Italian fascists. So people living there don't like them very much.
Italian people used to be the majority (~60% in the '60s) down to ~40% now, which is still a significant number.
> The Brenner Pass, in the Alps at the border between Austria and Italy, is one of the most important traffic connections between northern and southern Europe, and the motorway going over it is infamous for its frequent traffic jams. Pollution from transit traffic is a major concern..
> The goal is to relieve this situation by greatly improving the railway connection between North Tyrol and South Tyrol with the new tunnel, which will allow trains to cross the Alps much faster. The tunnel is scheduled to be completed in 2032.
Austria and Italy signed the agreement to build the tunnel in April 2003, so it's been a long time coming.. In 2017, the cost estimate was 7.8 billion Euro (~8.5b USD).
Although a tunnel across the whole alps is still quite impressive.