Feature
St. Gotthard: The world's longest railway tunnel: Promoting the transfer of freight traffic from road to rail
Florence Pictet Spokesperson for the Federal office of transport (Switzerland)
As of October 15th, 2010, the day when boring operations were completed on both sides, the Gotthard base tunnel supplanted Japan's Seikan Tunnel as the world's longest railway tunnel. Yet what the Swiss and many Europeans qualify as the "project of the century" is still ongoing, given that the 57-km long gallery is not scheduled to be fully operational before 2017. The objective behind this colossal project has been to promote the switch of freight transport onto rail in order to halve the number of trucks traveling on Alpine roads.