Amazing this is an advancement in term of innovations
World's longest and deepest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland
41–50 of 170 posts
Re: World's longest and deepest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, building passenger transit in an urban area is a very different thing, even if a long underground tunnel is a challenge in itself. Mining through solid rock is not really that expensive these days. But when building metropolitan transit, arranging traffic around of an existing population is not easy, and building transit stations is an expensive business. Making a tunnel through solid, hard rock is in any ca…
Really? The Cross rail project in London cost only 2bn more than the Swiss project but does exactly that, create an entirely new line under the whole of London, which is ridiculously hard to dig under (or so I've heard). Why the hell does it cost $50bn for you?
Cross-rail runs mostly on existing lines. Only 13 miles of the 85 total are new tunnels, so cost per mile is still almost a billion dollars.
(Being a bit unfair here, because the tunnelling cost is probably less than half the cost - the other half being rebuilding half a dozen massive underground train stations while keeping them operational.)
Re: World's longest and deepest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how much time approximately will be saved vs the existing routes?
It cuts the Zürich-Milan journey time for passenger trains by about an hour (from 173 to 111 minutes) accelerating train trips from Germany/Switzerland to Italy significantly.
I don't get this. Zurich is in Switzerland. I don't think even with this tunnel opening we will be getting from Zurich to Milan in under 2 hours... Are your numbers wrong?
Edit: we will be looking at journey times of about 170 minutes from Zurich to Milan AFTER the tunnel opens.
Re: World's longest and deepest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how much time approximately will be saved vs the existing routes?
It cuts the Zürich-Milan journey time for passenger trains by about an hour (from 173 to 111 minutes) accelerating train trips from Germany/Switzerland to Italy significantly.
Could you double-check the Zürich-Milan journey time?
The article says "... the journey time for travellers between Zurich and Milan will be reduced by an hour to two hours and 40 minutes."
I cross-checked that with http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/switzerland-s-gotthard-tra... ("reducing the journey times between Zurich, Switzerland, and Milan, Italy, from just over four hours to two-and-a-half hours") and http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2026369... ("the journey time of three hours and 40 minutes from Zurich to Milan on the Cisalpino tilting train will be cut by an hour".)
You can see these all give a time of over 150 minutes using the tunnel, not 111 minutes. They all agree it's a savings of about an hour.
Re: World's longest and deepest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland
#45"Nine workers died during the work." Although on-time or early and within budget, it is still a dangerous job to do. That is 0.346% of the total workforce (2600).
The project took 17 years. So more like 0.02% per year.
Re: World's longest and deepest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ahead of schedule based on an adjusted schedule during construction. They are slightly behind the originally planned schedule (a couple years). Obviously this is still a very well executed project overall.
Well obviously it's part of the Requirement Engineering process to adjust the schedule when the requirements change.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with changing the schedule. Anything else would be quite dumb and probably just delusional. Perfectly predicting the future is not possible and if honest mistakes or simply unknowns lead to this then that’s just normal.
However, here “ahead of schedule” is used as a, well, I guess compliment and for that it’s important to know the context. That they adjusted the schedule is obviously not at all a problem and, as I said, for a project this big the couple years it took longer aren’t really that relevant even.
Re: World's longest and deepest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland
#47This is $12.5b and 17 years for a 35 mile tunnel through solid rock. Seattle's transit plan is $50b, 25 years, and laying tracks on grade. Probably about the same number of miles. http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/03/24/st3-draft-plan-over...
The sad part is how much they are not getting for all these dollars. Figure with Portland around six percent of workers use the transit system. If your in the crowd making less than 75k then it goes up to eight percent.
Forty percent of the nations mass transit use occurs in NYC. Its even gone down everywhere but there. The cost per mile to install is staggering, but worse is that many systems are deferring maintenance and even worker pensions. Also while fees to ride are subsidized most don't understand that all maintenance has to be subsidized too. Throw in the silliness that is streetcars whose existence seems to only be to subsidize those who make them and we are just throwing money away
If you want to know how many ride the government can tell you. Go to http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml, do an advanced search for B08519
The percentages aren't good
Re: World's longest and deepest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how much time approximately will be saved vs the existing routes?
It cuts the Zürich-Milan journey time for passenger trains by about an hour (from 173 to 111 minutes) accelerating train trips from Germany/Switzerland to Italy significantly.
I heard numbers of 45 minutes less for Zurich-Milan. Maybe your number already includes the Ceneri Base Tunnel[1], to be opened in 2020?
Re: World's longest and deepest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well obviously it's part of the Requirement Engineering process to adjust the schedule when the requirements change.
And, more often than not, these requirement changes are used as excuses for extending the deadline so that project ends up being done "on time". I've worked in management on multi-year waterfall projects and this is how this game is played.
It would be fun to see an "agile" tunnel project.
"This rock is too solid to drill through with our machines!" – "Ok, for now let's just drill around it and make it an underground rollercoaster instead of a railway, we can get back to the original design later!"
Re: World's longest and deepest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland
#50"... longest and deepest rail tunnel ..." and "... delivered on time and within budget ..." Only in Switzerland, I guess. :) I wish there were better write ups of how the planning for this came together and what differs from other somewhat similar huge projects.
This is what I noticed most too; then I wondered how it compares with Crossrail. (Obviously I imagine tunneling under London is vastly different than under a mountain.)
Crossrail is also ahead of schedule and under budget (taking into account an explicit decision to delay it for a year but allow them to reduce the original budget by 1bn). They've done it by ruthlessly resisting scope creep. The flipside of that is that things added on later will end up costing more overall (e.g. adding the station at Old Oak Common and the connection to the WCML to relieve capacity while Euston is rebuilt for HS2) than if they were done as part of Crossrail.