Australian Science Illustrated – Issue 51 2017

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After 10 years of exhausting drilling, the 15-km-long St. Gottard railway tunnel

finally opened in 1882. The tunnel was an engineering triumph, but the very hard

work in the reeking, noisy, and smoke-filled hole had cost 199 men their lives.

One of them was the inventor of the project, who died deep inside his own tunnel.

A Hole Through the Alps

F

orget it! A lot of people offered

their advice to Louis Favre, when,

after a few days, he experienced

the first problems with the

tunnel, which he was about to build. Only

86 m into the Alps, his employees

encountered a water-bearing rock layer.

Water was pouring out, turning the tunnel

into a mud-filled hole.

Louis Favre was an energetic, selfmade

man, so he did not listen to naysayer, or give

up on his dream, but the water problem was

far from the only one to come up over the

course of the project.

Indeed, an almost infinite series of

challenges meant that the St. Gotthard tunnel

was not completed for another 10 years – four

years later than the optimistic Louis Favre had

expected. He never experienced the

completion nor the breakthrough in 1880,

when the two drilling teams from the north and

south met inside the mountain.

TRAINS TO CLIMB HIGH

Before the construction of the St. Gotthard

tunnel, the Alps made up a veritable wall

between Northern and Southern Europe.

One of the few places, in which it was

possible to climb the wall, was the St.

Gotthard Pass, which is located at an

altitude of 2,108 m, and the trip across it

was a highly strenuous experience. Only a

few felt up to it, and in the winter, snow

often blocked the pass for weeks.

UNITES EUROPE^1869
International conference discusses
the possibility of a new tunnel.

1872

The construction work

begins.

By Ib Salomon