Back in 1947, the engineer and transport planner Carl Eduard Gruner sketched out his idea for a Gotthard base tunnel between Amsteg and Bodio. Many decades would go by until the project could be realised.

From approval by Swiss voters to the final breakthrough, it took as many as 2,400 workers at peak times to construct two 57-kilometre-long tunnel tubes. On 15 October 2010, the first breakthrough took place in the east tunnel.

The tunnel boring machine for the Gotthard was as long as four football fields laid end-to-end. The rock was cut away with the boring head and removed via a bucket wheel on a conveyor belt. Various safety mechanisms protected against rock-fall hazards. All materials and equipment were located on board the machine, from the power supply of the tunnel borer to the removal of the excavated material.

A large proportion of the excavated rock was returned to the mountain’s interior in the form of concrete. The remaining material was used for landscaping of the site or as fill for dams. In the Lake of Uri, three shallow-water nature reserves and three bathing islands were created.

The Gotthard Base Tunnel is not only the world’s longest railway tunnel but also the deepest. In some places, there are 2,000 metres of rock between the tunnel and the earth’s surface.

Over more than three years, 125 workers laboured in three shifts, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, to install the slab track in the Gotthard Base Tunnel. They used 131,000 cubic metres of concrete and laid 290 kilometres of track and 380,000 sleepers among other elements.

This is the total length of the Gotthard Base Tunnel when all the shafts, cross-passages and access tunnels are added together, along with the two tunnel tubes.

In the future, some 260 freight trains and 65 passenger trains will traverse the Gotthard Tunnel each day. Freight trains will reach a maximum speed of 160 and passenger trains will travel at 200 km/h (even going up to 250 km/h in future). 

The reduction in travel time will gradually take effect starting in 2016. After completion of the work along the entire Gotthard axis (including the Ceneri Base Tunnel and access routes), travellers between Zurich and Lugano will save around 45 minutes.