World's longest and deepest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland

Porta Alpina ("Alpine Gate") was a proposed railway station to be located in the middle of the Gotthard Base Tunnel in southern Switzerland. Intended to promote tourism and the economy in the region of Graubünden, the project was put on hold as uneconomical in 2007, and then indefinitely shelved by the Swiss authorities in 2012.

Porta Alpina would have been the deepest underground train station in the world at 800 metres underground, outclassing by far Arsenalna Metro station at 105.5 metres.

The station was proposed to be located near a crossover between the northbound and southbound tunnels and to be linked to the surface by the world's highest elevator, using shafts built near the village of Sedrun for the construction of the tunnel. Construction costs were estimated at 40-50 million Swiss francs, with annual operating costs of 2.5 million francs. It was initially projected to be opened in 2016 after the Base Tunnel was scheduled to come into service.

I'm a civil engineer, and I do structural design work for a living.

If you're not trolling and you do mean what you've been saying, you're being very disingenuous and in the process proving to be true and perfectly valid all comments regarding the virtues of the swiss system in contrast with the typical engineering work around the world, the one you so vocally identify yourself with.

Engineering is not poker. It never was. Only bad engineering is like poker, and it shows in their work. You're confusing basic aspects of reliability analysis (the "this structure will fail 5% of the time" comment) with being poker. European structural design standards dictate that the lower failure probability of an engineering work, for its entire design working life, is around 0,05%. This is not poker.

As you've mentioned, the design process is centered on risk analysis and balances the economic impact of safeguarding against risk scenarios, but this is entirely immaterial for the discussion. The discussion is about planning, and the lack thereof. All projects are planned to an extent, but the point is that planning is often insufficient in the sense that important variables are left unknown until breaking ground for any number of reasons, one of which is this mentality that its unacceptable to spend much on risk assessment ("why spend money on non-destructive tests to infer the geotechnical profile and properties of each stratum in the preliminary design stage if we're boring a hole in there and eventually we'll reach that point ourselves?").

Unknowingly or not, you've supported this observation throughout all this discussion by arguing in favor of the virtues of handling a civil engineer project like "poker", and tolerating and accepting the occurrence of surprises associated with unacceptably high risk probabilities that go way up to 5%. This is precisely the problem everyone is pointing out and you've tried to deny but ended up supporting. This is the sole responsible for the typical cost overruns in civil engineering projects, and you inadvertently demonstrated why sadly this still rings true up to this day.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-36...