Europass Travel News - Swiss Build Gigantic Alps Tunnel

With all the tunnels that go through them, the Swiss Alps have often been compared to an enormous Swiss cheese. That comparison was awakened in recent months when a twenty two-mile rail tunnel was opened near the Alpine town of Frutigen.

Costing almost four billion, the tunnel supplements a nineteenth-century tunnel through the Lotschberg, the mountain in whose shadow Frutigen lies. But the new one differs from older tunnels by going through the base of the mountain, rather than its upper reaches. In addition to the main tunnel, for rail traffic, the mountain has been laced with twenty miles more of tunnel for maintenance and emergencies.

"You can say it's a true Swiss cheese," said Patrick Belloncle, a spokesman for BLS, the Swiss company that built and operates the tunnel.

But the Lotschberg tunnel is only part of a sweeping program to protect the Alps, a Swiss national heritage, from environmental damage.

But when the Swiss go, they go 1st class. When the tunnel is fully operational in December, it will accommodate not just seventy freight trains a day, but as many as thirty passenger trains, capable of going one hundred twenty miles per hour, cutting an hour off the trip from Basel, in northern Switzerland, to the south.

Europass travel will be wonderful through here!