World's Longest Tunnel Reaches Construction Milestone. ByNatalia Dannenberg, Deutsche Welle, 10/15/10. “After 15 years of construction work on the Gotthard Base Tunnel in the Swiss Alps, a gigantic 9.5-meter (31-foot) wide drilling machine called Sissi on Friday chewed its way through the remaining 1.5 meters of rock that joined two ends of the tunnel some 2,000 meters under a mountain. It's hoped the 57-kilometer (35.4-mile) tunnel will take heavy trucks off the roads and reduce pollution over the Alps when it opens in 2017. The breakthrough made the Gotthard Base Tunnel the longest tunnel in the world, exceeding the 53.8-kilometer Seikan rail tunnel linking the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido and the world's longest road tunnel, the 24.5-kilometer Laerdal in Norway…
“The 9.8 billion Swiss franc (7 billion euro/$10.2 billion) tunnel is part of a larger project to shift the haulage of goods from roads to rails, spurred mainly by a concern that heavy trucks were destroying Switzerland's pristine Alpine landscape… At least 1.2 million trucks cross the Swiss Alps each year and about a million of them pass through the St. Gotthard road tunnel. It's hoped that the number of freight vehicles will be halved once the Gotthard rail tunnel opens in 2017.”
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