Eiffel Over

Tag: Italy

  • Remarkably unremarkable – the longest tunnel in the world

    Yesterday I wrote about my remarkable journey southbound across Switzerland via the breathtaking Bernina Express. 

    For the homebound journey we opted for a faster itinerary: the Milan-Zurich express. Midway through the journey, drinking a coffee in the restaurant car, I noticed that we seemed to have been underground for quite a long time.

    A while later, still underground, thinking this is a very long tunnel, I sought out a map. To my delight and surprise I realised we were zipping along the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which, at 52km, is the longest rail tunnel in the world.

    What was so striking is how unremarkable this remarkable tunnel makes the journey. It is the opposite of the Bernina Express in so many ways, it is fast, straight, flat and has no views (at some point we will have crossed the watershed between the Po and the Rhine, but I was none the wiser).

    In a sense, the immense effort to build this tunnel has made the journey effortless. A flattening that smooths the flow of goods and people between northern and southern Europe. The Milan to Zurich journey time shortened by an hour.

    In their own times, both the Bernina and the Gottard routes were faster than what went before. Both a remarkable feats of engineering.

  • Bernina Express

    I recently traveled to Italy and back overland, seeking an alternative to the usual high-speed Paris-Milan service, which had been blocked for many months due to a landslip. But fortunately (like a more positive version of the poem ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’), when looking for alternative ways to cross the Alpine massif, then there definitely are other ways to go over it, under it and around it.

    The ‘around it’ route in case would have involved to the south of France and then along the coast to Italy. But French holiday travel precluded us from getting tickets on the fast French sections. And so we opted for going outbound ‘over it’ via the Bernina Express, and homebound ‘under it’ via the Gotthard Base tunnel.

    The Bernina Express really is the scenic way to cross the Alps. From the eastern Swiss town of Chur, the train corkscrews up inside mountains, zigzags across steep slopes and leaps over more than a hundred viaducts. This narrow-gauge railway turns impossibly narrow curves so that you regularly see the trailing end of the train out of the windows when you sit at the front. At the top of the Bernina Pass, over 2000 metres up, glaciers hang overhead in valleys above, and mineral water in lakes reflect the mountain-scape in technicolor. The descent begins where we cross the watershed between the Danube (leading to the Black Sea) and the Po (heading to the Adriatic) – two very different destinies for a raindrop. The descent feels steeper than the rise, with our destination of Tirano tantalisingly close in the valley below but the switchbacks and spirals taking over an hour to complete.

    Crossing over the border into Italy at the very end of the line feels like an achievement. And even though we have spent the last four hours sitting down, travelling this way you really get a sense of what an awesome barrier the Alps are right in the middle of Europe. How over the centuries trade might have travelled along these passes, and the advantages to the people able to make the route faster. 

    Top tip – the Bernina Express terminus and the Trenitalia station, for onward travel, are on two sides of a town square. The other two sides are occupied by cafes that will do you a delicious meal of pasta and leave you plenty of time to make your connection. 

    Tomorrow – ‘going under it’, via the Gotthard Base tunnel. 

  • Smoothing things out

    One of earliest childhood memories of travel is riding in the back of the car driving along a motorway in mountains in the north of Italy. To traverse a terrain of deep valleys and high ridges the engineers had taken a midline. The road leaps across the ravines on high viaducts, plunging straight into a tunnel only to fly out again across the next bridge. With the sea glistening deep below it was an exhilarating journey. (Did this sow the seed of going into civil engineering?)

    Faced with a series of peaks and troughs the engineers flattened the journey. They saved journey time and energy on every single car journey on that route, every day for over half a century.

    Smoothing things out is something that engineers seem to be generally good at. For example we’ve been straightening rivers to make them more navigable for centuries. 

    But building faster, straighter roads also increases traffic. Straightening rivers increases flood risk. 

    When we start to consider the unintended consequences smoothing things out we might find that working with the ups and downs and twists and turns is better. The friction slows down the flow. People or water, in these examples, spend longer in each place. There is greater interaction and opportunity exchange and creation of wealth in its many forms.

    Next time I cross the Italian Alps hopefully I can do it on a bicycle, following the contours of the river valleys.