World’s longest tunnel is European rail link that takes 20 minutes to cross

It’s even longer than the Chunnel.

Few obstacles are as formidable as Europe’s tallest and most expansive mountain range. Stretching 1,200km in a sweeping crescent from France to Austria, the Alps cut through eight countries.

Throughout history, crossing the Alps was a dangerous undertaking on foot or by mule. For as long as civilisation has existed in Europe, people have needed to traverse this mountain barrier that proved so crucial for commerce, travel and war.

The Romans battled to secure these routes. Legendary commanders such as Hannibal — with elephants in tow — and later Napoleon, marched their forces across these peaks for tactical wartime advantages.

Luckily, in modern times we have something like the Gotthard Base Tunnel. With a price tag of about £11.5bn, the rail passageway between northern and southern Europe opened in 2016 when it became the longest and deepest tunnel ever built.

The 57km tunnel is an essential link for both European travel and commercial freight transportation. It reduces journey times from Basel to Zurich and Milan to Lugano by as much as an hour, reports the Mirror.

The Gotthard tunnel is 2.3km (35 miles) under the surface, a remarkable depth comparable to the deepest mines in the world.

And thanks to its ingenious engineering, it takes about 20 minutes to cross, with trains racing through at maximum speed of 155mph.

Unlike older tunnels that wind their way up mountainsides, the Gotthard is entirely level. It is the first flat route through the Alps or indeed any comparable mountain system.

As the world’s longest tunnel, it surpasses the Channel Tunnel linking England and France by 7km.

It beats out the previous world record holder in Japan by 3km. The Seikan tunnel joins Honshu and Hokkaido, the country’s two largest islands.

The tunnel was built to replace the original Gotthardbahn rail tunnel, regarded as an engineering triumph of its time when it opened in 1882. Proposals for its successor began 100 years later in the 1980s.

The ambitious project took that 17 years to build. With 35 miles of mountainous terrain bearing down on the passage, one of the challenges was preventing the tunnel from caving in.

Thankfully, reinforced steel rings stretching across the tunnel bear the immense weight of the mountain overhead.

Builders employed a drill that measured the length of four football pitches. At 410m long and 10m wide, it bored through 40m of rock daily.