EU is building an $11B tunnel connecting Scandinavia to Italy | Hacker News Reader

EU is building an $11B tunnel connecting Scandinavia to Italy

designboom.com

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.

I think current gas prices will help shift that a bit. I don't think they are coming down anytime soon.

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.

Very confusing title and info graphics used in that article. The actual tunnel is only in the Alps.

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..."

So, a) it's click-bait, and b) it's not even true, because in that technical sense the two are already connected. Not clever.

I dunno, I tend to use "clickbait" to refer to things that are either more egregiously misleading or which just doesn't pay off at all. This is at least an interesting article about a cool engineering project.

Why not title it as just that, an interesting engineering project instead of bringing in Scandinavia in the title for the sole reason that it pulls more unsuspecting clicks.

Good question, maybe ask whoever wrote the article

I’m sure at some point a tunnel was built somewhere to technically connect Portugal and Vietnam.[1] Flagged.

[1] https://basementgeographer.com/the-longest-train-ride-in-the...

If there was a specific freight corridor between Portugal and Vietnam that was enabled by the construction of a cross-border tunnel which cuts through 55km of mountain, then I think we would see a similar fanfare for that. It's a bit harsh to flag me though, I didn't do anything wrong

I flagged the article for clickbait…

I definitely fell prey to this. I thought $11bn was far too cheap to build a tunnel that long.

The B1M (mentioned in the article) is a great Youtube channel covering all sort of interesting large infrastructure projects:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6n8I1UDTKP1IWjQMg6_TwA

Interesting that when this article was posted yesterday most of the comments said the exact opposite about B1M.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30983269

been watching it for a few years now. constantly solid content.

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).

Seems to me the Netherlands could put huge amounts of this material to good use.

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's not specially designed for the job. It's an estimation, calculation and BIM software.

Here's an article about the software and the job (it's in German tho): https://www.nevaris.com/warum-nevaris/referenzen/brenner-bas...

Btw, the political correct name for the Italian town in the video is "Franzensfeste" and not "Fortezza". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franzensfeste

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.

The actual tunnel is actually "only" from Austria to Italy.

This is the tunnel in question - for those who don't like to/cannot watch the video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel

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 no way a tunnel that long would be left to unreliable car or truck drivers, lest the tragedy that killed 11 in the 17km long Gotthard Tunnel in 2001 reoccur. On the comparable Channel Tunnel, cars and truck are carried on Eurotunnel rail shuttles, not left to their own devices.

$11B to completely tunnel under Germany and Austria would be quite cheap.

Although a tunnel across the whole alps is still quite impressive.

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.

I've driven from mid-Italy to Munich/Nuremberg many times in my life (vacations/fairs/etc.) and the Verona-Brenner-Innsbruck section is my favourite part of the trip. What a view! I wouldn't want to miss that in a tunnel!

But I understand. In August it seems that everyone loves the Garda lake, and you can be easily stuck for hours in your car while doing those 270Km.

PS: where would I purchase the Austrian "vignette" inside the tunnel? :)

This is a great example of why we can't just leave everything to private corporations (like it is in the American economic model). There is no financial incentive for any C-Suite executive to invest and spend time on projects that will only bear fruits 10-15 years later. Meanwhile, public governments with public finances can invest in such projects.

This is not true. It typically takes 10 years to develop new prescription drugs and fully complete regulatory approval.

Private companies are perfectly positioned to accomplish such tasks, because they are not beholden to re-election timelines or shifting voter demands.

Also, the efficiency for such a project’s necessary capital allocation can be adequately determined in the private sector by a profit analysis.

German here. The idea in general is extremely awesome... but the problem is, us Germans (or rather, our previous Conservative government) took pride in investing in highways instead of railways - and so, when the beautiful tunnel is built, it will take many years until it can be actually used at capacity because we couldn't be arsed to build out the railway route 5702 from Kufstein to Rosenheim and 5510 from Rosenheim to Munich [1] to four rails instead of the current two, which are split between regional S-Bahn trains, inter-regional trains, freight trains and high-speed trains.

[1] https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/brennerbasistunnel-deut...

Very similar to the situation with the Gotthard Base Tunnel. Switzerland managed to build the longest railway tunnel in the world within 17 years, and we will barely manage to build a few kilometers of supporting infrastructure in the Rhine valley, which is mostly flat and rural, until 2035 [1]. It's embarrassing, really.

[1] https://bauprojekte.deutschebahn.com/p/karlsruhe-basel

As far as I remember this is also against promises made, showing Germany to be an unreliable partner in such undertakings.

Trusting German rail companies to do anything sane or agreed upon is a fool's errand. Their leadership and structures are so brittle, things just don't get done.

I say companies, because DB is split into 500 sub-companies that have their own infrastructure and seemingly don't work together very effectively.

The problem in that specific case is not the Bahn organization itself, but politics. On one hand you have a lot of regional NIMBYs, and on the other hand we have had 16 years of Conservative government which was wholly bought off by the car lobby which meant that there was no interest in solving the issues (even if, need be, by drowning the NIMBYs in money). Only thing that got done railway-wise is the start of Stuttgart 21 (which is mostly a prestige project, not something that actually makes sense) and the start of the 2nd Munich S-Bahn tunnel.

Interesting -- expected this to be about the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link¹, as there are already various tunnels through the Alps...

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_Fixed_Link

Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30983269

(The original flagged for the absurdly dishonest title, which appears to have carried over to this blogspam.)

So basically the same length as the Channel Tunnel, but bored through much harder rock.

The Austria/Italy segment seems impressive but straightforward. A rail connection between Sweden and Finland looks like the big challenge.

I'm very excited about this project. Bologna to Munich is a 6 hour train journey now, and the tunnel will make it way shorter and faster.

Previously they wanted to do the tunnel between Finland and Estonia, but it seems to have been going nowhere.

Projects of that size takes time. Multiple decades before any actual work is not out of the ordinary. The planing is aiming at finishing the tunnel in the 30s, so I would guess that it'll be done in the 40s.

See Larry? This is what you get when you bore a tunnel through the Alps!

The title is misleading and should be changed.

Are you arguing it should be "the EU is building an $11billion tunnel connecting scandinavia to the mediterranean"?

I agree the tunnel doesn't run from the Med to Scandanavia, or indeed anywhere in Italy to Scandanavia, however that's what the article claims

It should say "through the Alps." That, to me, lines up with how interesting the article is, and is more clear.

HN doesn't typically fix inacurate headlines. I suspect that the "to the mederterranian" would make it too long for HN, "to Italy" is a reasonable contraction without going into editorialising.

However the reason the youtube video goes for "Scandanavia to the Med" is because that's what the corridor is called

https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/infrastructu...

HN changes titles all the time. Especially when the title is a bit click baity. This one is like saying that the Chunnel connects Saigon to Scotland.

"please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. "

I don't think this is misleading, it's the tunnel that is a key stage in the Scandinavian-Mediterranean Corridor, an official EU project.

"The cross-border alpine connection between Munich and Verona represents a major bottleneck on the corridor and will be alleviated by the construction of the Brenner Base Rail Tunnel, when it

I think the problem is on the other direction. Austria is nowhere near Scandinavia.

Better 16 billion... 18 billion... 22 billion... 34 billion... etc. We all know, how that goes, especially the city of Berlin, which built a cool new airport...

The Berlin airport, in fairness, is a bit of an edge-case; cost/time overruns on that scale aren't normal.

I beg to differ. Stuttgart 21 underground train station [1]: Estimated cost 2009: €4.5 billion. Estimated cost 2022: Over €9 billion. Estimated start of operation: Six years later than anticipated (2025, or 15 years after construction started).

Another, recent example: German Cyber Threat Reporting Center that is supposed to report cyber threats to NATO is still not operational after five years and €60 million. Admittedly, not on a billion dollar scale, but the example shows how even a relatively simple task like creating reports is plagued by overruns.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21 [2] https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/pro...

These are three German projects, two of which are unrelated to rail, tunnelling or transport in general. And they're meant to be an example of why a tunnel in Austria and Italy would overrun by a factor of up to 3x?

The first one, "Stuttgart 21" is very much related to rail. From the referenced Wikipedia article:

> Stuttgart 21 is a railway and urban development project in Stuttgart, Germany. It is a part of the Stuttgart–Augsburg new and upgraded railway and the Main Line for Europe (Paris—Vienna)

Regarding tunneling:

> The current 17-track station is to be replaced by an underground 8-track through station.

This project started in 2006 and from what I can find, cost estimates have not changed much. The initial range was 6 to 12 billion Euros at 2006 prices. Converted to $ and adjusted for inflation, $11B is right in the middle of that range.

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