The new tunnel reduces travel times between Ticino and German-speaking Switzerland. And thanks to fast S-Bahn connections, it turns the southern canton into a “Città Ticino”. But some problems remain unsolved.

The time has come. The official opening of the new Ceneri Base Tunnel will be celebrated this Friday – in view of the coronavirus and the necessary protective measures, however, on a modest scale. Only a few dozen of the originally 650 invited guests will be there. Federal President Simonetta Sommaruga, Federal Councilor Ignazio Cassis, and others will officially hand over the tunnel to the operator SBB. Commissioning will follow in December with the changeover to the 2021 timetable.

Ex-Federal Councilor Moritz Leuenberger at the start of construction work in 2006

The Ceneri Base Tunnel, the New Alpine Transversal (Neat) is completed, construction of the century that took 28 years to complete – the Ceneri 14 years alone – and devoured around 22 billion francs. A flat railway through the Alps, “which, as a contribution to the protection of the Alps, should make an important contribution to shifting freight traffic from road to rail”, as Minister of Transport Sommaruga tirelessly repeated.

For rail customers, travel times between north and south are reduced by around 20 minutes:

A drive from Zurich to Lugano will take just under two hours.

The train ride from Lucerne to Lugano will now take 1 hour and 40 minutes.

A EuroCity train between Zurich and the northern Italian metropolis of Milan now takes 3 hours and 17 minutes.

That is fast, but still a long way from the promises that the Federal Council made on the Neat in the 1992 referendum vote. In the voting booklet at the time, it was said: “The NEAT gives us access to the European transport network of tomorrow. From Zurich, Milan can be reached in a good 2 hours, Paris and Frankfurt in 3 hours, London and Rome in just under 5 1/2 hours. ”

Miners celebrating the major breakthrough in 2016

Speeds of up to 250 km / h: the base tunnel in numbers

The Ceneri Base Tunnel runs from Camorino near Bellinzona to Vezia near Lugano. With a length of 15.4 kilometers, the tunnel is the third and third longest tunnel in the New Alpine Transversal (Neat) after the Gotthard (56 km) and Lötschberg Base Tunnels (34.6 km). For safety reasons, as with the Gotthard, two single-track tubes were built for the Ceneri, which led to a massive increase in costs. These are 40 meters apart and are connected to each other every 325 meters by 48 crosscuts. The overburden with mountains in the Ceneri zone is a maximum of 800 meters. The excavated material reached 7.9 million tons. 900 kilometers of copper cable, 10,500 kilometers of fiber optics, and 66.6 kilometers of track were laid.

Visiting the construction site of the tunnel in February 2017