March 18, 2007 (Gotthard rail tunnel) A tunnel of superlatives

Following article was published by the Toronto Star.

Switzerland's Gotthard rail line will bore through the Alps for 57 km. If we can do this, can we beat global warming?
Mar 18, 2007 04:30 AM
by Bill Taylor

The Swiss are not generally given to hyperbole, but a new tunnel being carved under the Alps has already been hailed as "the crowning achievement of the 21st century."

Journalist Rolf Ribi also describes it as "a tunnel of superlatives." At 57 kilometres, the big dig on Switzerland's Gotthard railway line between Erstfeld and Bodio will be the longest in the world. "Never," Ribi enthuses, "has a tunnel been dug so far into a mountain."

It makes the Big Becky tunnel project in Niagara Falls and a whole Top 10 of Canadian projects, as listed by ReNew Canada: The Infrastructure Renewal Magazine, seem puny. They range from a $4.25-billion refurbishment of the Bruce nuclear power station in Kincardine to improvements to the Sea to Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler.

The new rail line, costing 18 billion Swiss francs (about $17 billion), is set to open in 2016. Crews at either end began boring toward the middle in 1993. When their 10-metre diameter augers meet, the drill bits – according to the now-inevitable computer model – will be less than 20 centimetres off-centre.

When the world was younger and more innocent, that awesomeness would have been more than enough to induce superstitious fear in the populace.

It's why the medieval architects of Europe's great cathedrals, from Salisbury to Florence, Paris to Seville, built them massive: not only to the greater glory of their god, but to keep the rank-and-file in line. Anyone who could construct something so awe-inspiringly majestic was clearly not a person to cross.

Thinking big was more than just personal insurance for the hereafter; it was an effective social breakwater. The great unwashed stayed at the king's feet rather than at his throat.

We're less gullible now. We look at the hole in the ground where the Bay-Adelaide Centre will go and we know how it's done. Far from inspiring awe, it's more likely to move us to rumblings – "another highrise?!" – of dissent.

We may not fully understand the engineering principles involved, but we can go online for an explanation and we know there's no angelic intervention involved. Just as we know the gargoyles on Old City Hall are a draftsman's whim, not creatures to ward off evil spirits.

Is there a genetic quirk at play here? An ancient urge to create edifices? A human – and humanizing – proclivity to co-operate in giving a monumental idea concrete form and function? To think big and thus get big things done. We work together well on construction. Not only cathedrals but domed stadiums and the CN Tower and the bridge to P.E.I.; nameless dams and unheralded power plants and convoluted highway interchanges beyond number.

And sometimes something as mind-bogglingly complex as the seven older and helical – that is, shaped like a coil – tunnels of the Gotthard railway. This was 19th-century technology, done without benefit of computer simulations. Real reality from the word go, as opposed to the virtual kind.

To cut a spiral into a mountain, constantly turning and changing elevation, using nothing but dead reckoning... an engineering tour-de-force that might still bring a credulous man to his knees. It has impressed UNESCO enough to likely be named as a World Cultural Heritage site.

The new tunnel – which is actually two single-line bores – runs dead straight and almost horizontal. (The helical tunnels allowed trains to climb quite steeply in a relatively short space.) The twin tubes will be connected every few hundred metres in case there's an emergency in one and the other is needed as an escape route.

Passenger trains, flashing blindly beneath some of the world's most dramatic mountainscapes at 250 km/h, will cut an hour off the 3 1/2-hour Zurich-Milan journey time. Freight trains will carry double their present loads at 160 km/h. Engineering ingenuity fuelled by the demands of commerce. A tunnel of superlatives.

It remains to be seen whether humanity can marshal its collective resources to build a solution to a more nebulous but utterly mountainous problem: global warming.

Billionaire entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson is devoting the next 10 years' profits from his Virgin trains and airliners (jets, paradoxically, are a significant contributor to the problem) to finding a solution and, literally, save the planet. Will this estimated $3.5 billion be sufficient to pay for developing the necessary expertise, leadership and political volition, or will it only buy us a little time?

In the grander scheme of things, we've been like just so many little kids, bent on building bigger sandcastles. And with a construction project, you start with "this" and then you do "that" and you continue step by logical step until it's done. There's a beginning and an end.

Calamity knows no such logic. Can a genius for creating wonders of the world be turned to dealing with pandemic intangibles? The evidence so far is that we can't even achieve consensus on what to do first. Someone says "this," someone else says "no." They say "that" and we, in turn, raise objections.

We're like the donkey in the fable, with two bundles of hay to choose from. Unable to decide which to eat first, it starved.

The important thing is to start. Somewhere. Or are we doomed to grasp the fearful implications of climate change but be unable to build a metaphoric dam against the coming cataclysm?

Maybe the best we can hope for is a state-of-the-art Ark. The crowning achievement of the 21st century, instead of being our own salvation, will remain a tunnel the like of which we've never seen. That perhaps, by century's end, no one will use. Except as hopeless shelter from the man-made storm.