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I see a countdown timer at the Bellinzona station. Edit. I think the first (regular PASSENGER) train's going to run through the tunnel sometime in Dec 2016.
First passenger train (filled with VIPs) is gonna be 2nd of June 2016, first passenger train on a regular schedule is sometime on Dec 11.
Is the water they talk about naturally warm? Is it because it's deep within the earth that it is heated compared with surface water?
Yes I think so. Geothermal sources are a common occurence inside the alps.
They heat a tropical greenhouse and sturgeon farm with water from another tunnel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropenhaus_Frutigen
They weren't able to dump the water directly into the local river because it would disrupt the native trout, and so they cool it with the greenhouse and farm.
If I remember right the greenhouse and farm were businesses started by the engineers that were on the tunnel project.
The caviar is nice - not as much minerality as normal, but still good texture and taste.
Yes, that's correct. Except for the first 100 feet or so, the deeper you go into the Earth the warmer it gets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient
So while the tunnel is at surface level at the entry and exit points, for the majority of the distance it's many thousands of feet deep. It's about 15 degrees F per 1000 feet, so if it's 5000 feet below the average height of the mountain range then you might expect the tunnel to be 75 degrees F warmer than the surface.
If the average surface temperature is say 50F then adding 75F gets you to 125F which isn't enough to boil water or generate electricity (efficiently) but it's definitely hot enough to warm a lot of things in a meaningful way.
It is admirable.
Hits on a pet idea of mine:
We have a major issue with rail transportation in the US. It's most useful in cities in a grade-separated form, but it's simultaneously the hardest to build in cities in a grade-separated form. The number of existing pipelines, power lines, traffic reroutes, building permits, and private property consents required to check out grows to dizzying levels of complexity.
One way to bypass this is to dig deep, deep tunnels. Tunnels far enough down that surface settling doesn't occur, tunnels far enough down to bypass skyscraper pilings. To do this well, though, you need to construct as much of each station as possible in the tube itself, and only sink shafts down to that level, not whole horizontal rooms.
You can do that with a ~20m diameter TBM. You buy this monster of a machine for an exorbitant amount of money, and in exchange you get to leave the walls that it constructs in place, except for some vertical elevators and a vertical stairwell directly to the platform; No blasting, no extensive bit-by-bit excavation, no surface trenches, no access tunnels, no adjusting to separate mud and soil and rock. Just two tracks in a big tube with a bunch of space in between them, and maybe a second level for another pair with an express line.
Of note, the further below the surface train stations are, the more inefficient they are, especially for daily use and commuting type lines. It takes time to get that far down in the ground from the street level. It's less of an issue for long haul transit of course, but in that case there's few stations and they can be big downtown stations anyways.
As someone who grew up in Washington DC and moved to NYC, it was immediately and obviously noticeable. The ability to just hop down a few stairs and jump on a train is a major improvement to convenience. The multiple levels, elevators or long, long escalators, and so on, can double or triple the amount of minutes it takes to go 3-4 stops.
We have available to us high-speed, high-capacity elevators now, standard in large buildings. The DC Metro's escalators were a lot of things, among them great big monumental architectural Statements; But as you and anyone else from the area knows, they were not particularly well thought-out (and we are still paying for that mistake in maintenance problems, wait times, expensive rain shelters, et cetera).
Their progenitor, as I recall, went to the great lengths of riding them aboard a wheelchair every day in a pained attempt to prove to the planning committee that elevators, which would have spoiled his precious vaulted look, were not necessary.
Elevators and the numbers of bodies you need to move with mass transit really aren't amenable.
A ten-car train in an urban commuter rail system might have 40-80 passengers per car. That's up to 800 people deboarding (say, for a downtown terminal station), though generally you're looking at a low few hundred.
Dumping that demand onto 3-4 escalators is doable, and the streaming is continuous. For elevators, I don't see it working. Too many people and elevators don't operate continuously as escalators do.
Unless there've been tremendous advances I'm unaware of.
Schindler's high-capacity elevators are rated for 6-21 people. It would take 38 elevator trips to empty the train I described above (divide among multiple shafts and/or car trips as you like, but realize that speed is 1-1.6 m/s (about 3.6 mph), or just over 60s to travel 100m, plus return and dwell time. If train service intervals were ten minutes, you'd need ten shafts assuming 3 minutes per round-trip to clear 800 passengers.
http://www.schindler.com/content/pl/Internet/pl/modernizacja...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster
:)
Very interesting... if Hitachi did go past the prototype stage, it could indeed be the answer...
Video from the link (in Japanese):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7YIBWve0n4
Paternosters have been used in the past but usually were discontinued because of (gruesome) accidents. There were a couple in Amsterdam in my childhood.
Yes, the old versions (where there were periods in which someone could fall into a shaft) look dangerous.
The Hitachi version is interesting because it incorporates the behaviour one expects from standard elevators, at the cost of some speed.
It sounds ideal for a mass transit station, and it could use the same pattern as is currently used for subways (a small time it remains motionless, then the doors close after a beep).
I found an English version of their video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnX5WZhvzZY
and ThysenKrupp is also working on a similar idea:
http://rt.com/news/210143-maglev-horizontal-elevator-thyssen...
Though Hitachi has decided to focus on speed instead:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/smart-news/worlds-f...
I hope the innovation in this space doesn't dry out :)
Interesting, I was thinking of a possible similar design but wasn't aware that there was an extant model.
A series of cars, in parallel shafts, with safety lockouts, and capable of reasonably streamed operation, might work. It would be complex, but then most options are.
The Wheaton DC Metro station features the longest set of single-span escalators in the Western Hemisphere, each featuring a length of 230 feet (70 m), with a vertical rise of 115 feet (35 m). The trip takes approximately 2 minutes and 45 seconds.
Extrapolate that to a ~100m depth for a wait of 8 minutes 15 seconds, with a ~200m horizontal span that needs to be excavated manually all the way to the surface - you probably need one to two city blocks of demolition for a 30deg escalator.
There are some high-speed elevators out there, at these heights we're strongly limited by comfortable acceleration (at the highest peak speeds from Mitsubishi or Toshiba you'd be talking about upwards of ~15m/s, but you couldn't safely reach those at this height). 1m/s^2 seems to be okay. That puts a half a trip at 10 seconds, or 20 seconds from when the doors finish closing to when the doors begin opening. Figure 25 seconds on either end for filling and emptying, and you have a 90 second round trip. Expect something like 4 20-person elevators for typical stops, to maybe 16 for an inner-city transfer station, and you can move 50-200 people per minute.
According to Metro, a single escalator can move 90 people per minute; They typically pack 2 escalators and a stairwell, or 3 escalators running 2-1 peak flow, into a shaft, but escalator availability ran as low as 60 percent for a number of decades before a recent improvement drive (now ~92%), so you had good odds that at least one was broken (or, in optimistic parlance, 'had become stairs').
Excellent point!
The Japanese started engineering for this as well when they went through a bonanza of submerging rail lines in Tokyo. At first, they started digging super deep with smaller tunnels (the trains use a linear motor/reaction-rail for much tighter loading gauges). However, they started to realize that it made the the now submerged trains more inefficient to be so deep. More recent lines are elevated or much more shallow.
The vast majority of american rail infrastructure is based on diesel, not electric trains, which vastly complicates tunnel constructure due to the level of ventilation required.
For instance, the Cascade tunnel in eastern Washington (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Tunnel) can only handle ~one train per hour because they basically have to replace all the air in the tunnel every time, which takes about a half hour even with giant fans.
Tunnels, especially deep ones, are also extraordinarily expensive, that's why modern rail is built on viaducts, not in tunnels, because it's just much much cheaper.
Urban light rail is almost universally electric. NYC, Chicago, DC, LA, BART, Seattle, Portland, etc. Sounds like a few places need to contemporize still, but in a lot of cities, electric has been the norm for a long time and we can trivially add more tunnels and not worry about exhaust.
Urban light rail is such a small blip in terms of overall rail traffic that it probably barely even registers in ton/mile terms.
It's like saying you could build all roads in tunnels because Tesla sells cars.
Urban rail in general tends to lean more electric than diesel, especially if you go by passenger/mile. Something like 2/3s of US rail riders live in the New York metropolitan area, which runs mostly electric trains.
In terms of intercity traffic, unless there is a compelling reason to tunnel it should be level or slightly raised, with the road crossings going over or under (since road vehicles are better at accelerating and decelerating when climbing or going down grades).
Passenger traffic in general is a tiny fraction of freight. Freight drives the conversation.
Here is a wonderful study on the costs of light rail and its efficiency versus other forms of mass transit. [1]
Here is a telling quote about why digging deep is the wrong answer.
"Seattle, however, is building an entire light- rail line underground from the University of Washington to downtown Seattle. When completed in 2016, the line is expected to cost $628 million per mile, yet it will not carry any more people per hour than San Diego’s original 1981 light-rail line that cost $17 million per mile.
The total cost of the 3.1-mile subway would be enough to build almost 200 miles of elevated busways at $10 million per lane mile. Seattle’s first light-rail line, which opened in 2007, was also completely separated from streets, costing $175 million per mile (nearly $200 million per mile in today’s dollars)."
[1] http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa750_w...
Seattle in all fairness has some of the most incompetent local government of all time. They couldn't govern themselves out of a crackerjack box, if their lives depended on it.
No, Seattle is not unique. Check out the costs and delays of the 2nd Ave Subway in NYC.
Closer to me, I've previously complained about the bridges across the Columbia river between Washington and Oregon.
In 1982 a very fine bridge was built for $172 million.[1]
What finally got scuttled in 2013 was a different proposed bridge that would have cost $2800 million.[2] Now I understand there was some intervening inflation, but there was a 16x cost increase (before inevitable cost overruns) between the two projects.
Government at all levels, federal, state, municipal, is a very poor steward of Other People's Money.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_L._Jackson_Memorial_Brid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River_Crossing
Seattle thinks that is a great idea...
Meanwhile in London:
Crossrail tunnel already smells of urine
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/crossrail-tunnel-...
If you ever wondered where the smell on the DLR at bank comes from.
http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2014/02/02/how-a-tube-statio...
Ha.
They've recently created some new shops at Canary Wharf Tube, and there is now a fancy Neal's Yard shop right where the Gents toilets used to be.
Looks pretty impressive and to think some people say tunnelling is boring! It is and it isn't. :)
In other news, Crossrail finished tunnelling today. Not as long as this but still a big project.
http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/articles/prime-minister-and-...
Haha, tunneling IS boring! Pun attempted, pun achieved.
That was the (intended) joke. Hard to get across in writing. The boring work is over now!
"...the Gotthard base tunnel 'broke all the rules' and the excavation was finished nearly a year ahead of schedule."
I'd like to know more about this.
In a report from 2006[1] they prognosed a start of normal operations in 2017 with a delay of up to four years but also the possibility of finishing early by one year.
In 2012 they seemed confident to open in 2016, but I can't really find the reasoning for that. As far as I can see there were also cost considerations playing a part in the decision.
Edit: apparently a very difficult Dolostone section was less proplematic than anticipated (again, couldn't find an english source for this)
[1] (in three languages but no english, sorry): http://www.parlament.ch/r/mm/2007/Paginas/mm_2007-04-27_9519...
What a strange article. Is there a translation or cultural context? The part about the Japanese "los[ing] face" or the reference to Russian civic culture are two of many puzzling bits.
Swiss culture is still very insular. As an example of language and imagery that would be seen as quite racist in the US or the rest of Europe, take a look at this poster from the SVP/UDC party, currently the strongest party in the Swiss federal parliament: http://www.20min.ch/schweiz/news/story/22226627
The slogan means "no special rights for foreigners", in protest of a practice that allows foreign residents in switzerland to sign petitions to open up a non-binding resolution in local city councils.
I don't think I've seen such baldly racist imagery from a US political party in my lifetime - it looks like WW2 propoganda.
There's a whole group of expats called Grumpy Expats on FB discussing such issues. https://www.facebook.com/groups/784454428295368/?fref=nf
Well, when over 20% of residents in Switzerland at any time are foreign born, you can kind of understand why some of them might feel that somebody needs to fight for their corner.
I tried to be careful to only condemn the racist imagery. I don't know enough about Swiss politics to comment on this particular debate.
That seems a little unfair. The SVP are indeed the "strongest party" in the swiss government, but they still only hold 54 out of 200 seats in the National Council. Parties in many other European democracies have expressed equally repellent views in recent years -- the rise of racist anti-immigrant parties is not a problem unique to the swiss by any means.
As an American (who has also spent a lot of time in Switzerland) I agree that it's shocking. But, I think it's also a little understandable. There is a strong desire to preserve swiss culture. Switzerland is a country with a history and culture stretching back into antiquity. In the US, we are a country of immigrants.
Meanwhile, Seattle can't figure out how to dig their tunnel more than a couple hundred yards without everything breaking down.
Tunneling is generally a bit simpler well above sea level - the main enemy isn't ROCK, but water, and keeping things dry.
It's also proven to be a challenge in Amsterdam [0]. In The Netherlands (the North-South Line) due to the 'soft' (marsh-like) ground.
---
[0]: http://www.dutchamsterdam.nl/691-amsterdam-north-south-metro
It's a Japanese company doing it no?
It's a great project, but that article is a bit deceptive. The breakthrough video is from 2010. Official opening is a year away. The tunnels are finished, with track, power, and signaling almost ready.[1] But the connections to the railway system at both ends aren't ready yet.
As tunnel projects go, it was a long drive, but not an unusually difficult one. Mostly hard rock, some water problems, but not too much water. Many tunneling projects are more about keeping the water out and the roof supported than digging.
Surprisingly, it was just a 4 TBM job, two tubes cut entirely from the ends. Although there are several vertical shafts down to emergency stations, those were not used as TBM starting points. Each TBM had to grind forward for almost 14 years.
[1] https://www.alptransit.ch/en/status-of-the-work/railway-infr...
If they include the Koralm Tunnel on the list, which is under construction, they could as well add the Brenner Basis Tunnel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel) :)
When completed, it will be the world's second largest tunnel, only shorter than this one.