Skip to main content

Here are 10 astounding pictures of the world's longest railway tunnel

Heralded as the construction project of the century, the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland is among the world’s most ambitious tunnel projects, spanning more than 35 miles and taking 17 years to build. The tunnel, which opened on June 1, runs under the Alps and connects the Swiss municipalities of Erstfeld and Bodio.

The architectural marvel is the longest and deepest railway tunnel in the world, and the first flat, low-level route through the Alps. The idea was first proposed in 1968, but project construction didn’t begin until 1996, and required the excavation of 94 miles of underground tunnels, shafts, and passages to connect the 35.5-mile route. Approximately 31.1 million tons of granite, sedimentary rock, and other material was moved during construction. The bulk of the digging was handled by tunnel-boring machines (80 percent) with some blasting (20 percent) required in difficult sections. An extensive ventilation network was necessary to aerate the 750-foot-deep tunnel and cool it from its ambient 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Over 2,400 workers were involved in the construction at its peak, and nine of them lost their lives during the $12 billion project.

The primary purpose of the tunnel is to facilitate the transport of freight and passengers across the Alps. The tunnel’s route mirrors the Gotthard Railway, which is an important transportation corridor connecting northern and southern Europe. Traffic across this corridor has increased more than tenfold since 1980, with all existing tunnels operating at their maximum capacity.

The base tunnel opened this week following an inauguration ceremony attended by Swiss Federal President Johann Schneider-Ammann. The rail will open in a limited capacity until the end of the year when full operations are expected to begin. When operating fully, the corridor will carry 325 trains each day. The daily schedule will include 260 freight trains traveling at 99mph and 25 passenger trains at 124mph. These speeds will increase over time with trains capable of travel at 155mph expected to arrive in the coming years.

Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more