Orphan Road

NYT with a great little piece on a 22-mile rail tunnel recently opened in the Swiss Alps.

... the Lötschberg tunnel is only part of an ambitious program to protect the Alps, a Swiss national heritage, from environmental damage.

The environmental problem arises because the Alps lie right between two of Europe’s most dynamic economic regions, northern Italy and southern Germany, which have threatened to overwhelm the mountains with truck traffic. So more than a decade ago, the Swiss voted to impose steep tariffs on trucks passing through their country. They also voted to ban the construction of four-lane highways in the Alps.

By last year Switzerland had collected more than $1.1 billion in tolls. The money has been used to improve older tunnels and build new ones to put freight on rails, either directly or by putting truck trailers onto flatbed rail cars.

But when the Swiss go, they go first class. When the tunnel is fully operational in December, it will accommodate not just 70 freight trains a day, but as many as 30 passenger trains, capable of going 120 miles per hour, cutting an hour off the trip from Basel, in northern Switzerland, to the south.

The Swiss are not finished, either. They are now busily digging an even more ambitious 35-mile tunnel under the St. Gotthard Pass to the east, to supplement two existing 19th-century tunnels, to be completed by 2016.

By 2009, the Swiss want to reduce the number of trucks that pass over the country’s north-south roads to 650,000 a year, from 1.4 million in 2000, which would continue a long decline in truck traffic. Since 1995, such traffic has swollen by 40 percent in the European Union, but has declined by 8 percent in Switzerland.

More and more I feel like Americans would do well to spend less time harrumphing about their mythical superiority in things like monster engineering projects, and more time learning about how they get things done these days in other parts of the developed world. Fact is there's just nothing (maybe the Big Dig or the East Side Subway, but little else) going on in the US that even compares to the Swiss tunnel plan in its scope and ambition.