Alpine Tunnels | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 29, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 29.

Alpine Tunnels.

THE Simplon Tunnel, which will very shortly be completed, is another, and the most formidable, of the gigantic railway connections undertaken of late years to facilitate the communications between Italy and the rest of Europe; and the project suggests a comparative note on the existing Alpine tunnels. At the present time the Alps are pierced by three remarkably long tunnels, entering Italy from France, Switzerland, and the Austrian Tyrol, respectively, and called, according to the mountain chains that are traversed, the Mont Cenis, St. Gothard, and Arlberg Tunnels. Of these, the Mont Cenis, which connects Chambéry with Turin, is seven and three-quarter miles in length, and between 3,000 and 4,000 feet above the sea. Its cost was 75,000,000 francs.

The St. Gothard Tunnel, which connects Lucerne directly with lakes Maggiore and Como, and so to Milan, is nine miles and a quarter in length, and cost 57,000,000 francs, the diminution in expense being owing partly to the softer strata, but principally to the more rapid progress of the work by improvements in the drilling machines. The Arlberg is shorter than either Mont Cenis or St. Gothard, being only six miles and a half, although its summit level is nearly one thousand feet higher. By this tunnel a communication is given between Innsbruck, in the Austrian Tyrol, and Zurich.

The last and most formidable rival will be the Simplon Tunnel, by which the existing line from Geneva to Martigni and Brieg will be carried through the mountain to Domo d’Ossola, and so on to Pallanza or Stresa on the Lake Maggiore. As this tunnel will be commenced at a much lower level than any of the others, it will necessarily be longer, the rough estimate being twenty kilometers, or twelve miles and a half, and the estimated cost somewhere about 100,000,000 francs. The difficulties of ventilating so long a tunnel, which were once thought insuperable, have been pretty well disposed of by the experiences of St. Gothard, which is lighted by lamps placed at intervals of 1,150 yards; and although the temperature is certainly somewhat high (about seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit), the traveler feels no discomfort, while the freedom from smoke is far greater than in the shorter tunnels. There are thirty-six of these latter, extending over an aggregate of twenty-five miles, and some of them are so peculiarly spiral that the traveler performs an unconscious corkscrew course under ground, emerging in an entirely opposite part of the defile to that at which he entered.—Christian at Work.