Sweden has taken 23+ years to complete a rail tunnel for 200 Km passeger and freight bypass.
Corrected my typo
its 23 not 33 and work was suspended for 8.
That is still 15 years of activity to complete the project.
Looking at the picture, that is one wide tunnel.
The article refers to twin bores, so there is also a second tunnel parallel to the one in the picture. I don’t recall if the article said indicated if they were being bored concurrently or consecutively.
But the time lag is minimal; the Channel Tunnel between England and France had something like 200 years between the first tentative starts and the final completion! One or two wars intervened, of course, starting with Napoleon.
Napoleon didn’t start the war.
One quote from the article: “The tunnel will allow the number of trains to be increased from four to 24 per hour …”
Could this be a misprint? I’m thinking ‘per day’ might be correct.
The Wikipedia article goes into more detail about the ‘environmental issues’. Apparently the contractor used a sealant that was toxic and it seeped into the water table. Oops. Sounds like a very challenging tunnel to build, like the very unheralded Inland Feeder aqueduct project; that one took 12 years to complete.
If you replace a single track with heavy grades and curves with a shorter double track tangent, a six-fold increase in capacity is well within the realm of possibility.
Also, consider the JR-Central Chu-O Nishi Hon Sen, parts of which are single track with curves and heavy grades. It carries only two local and one express passenger trains per hour in each direction.
Part of the confusion stems from the idea of, “What is a train.” Americans tend to think in terms of a mile and a half of freight cars ambling along behind the motive power. In most places, trains are much shorter - and much faster.
Chuck
Link says costs over $1.25B US dollars of over 5 times original cost estimate. And we think only USA subject to cost over runs.
I was idly paging through and old Railway Gazette online dating from the construction of Grand Cental Terminal and it stated that the NYC was upgrading the Park Avenue approach tracks to handle a train on each one every 3 minutes (or 20/hour). The PRR stated that the peak capacity of each Hudson River tunnel was 72 trains/hour (or one every 41.5 seconds).
That sound a bit like those trains in the North American Joint PTC project that featured zero length in block… [;)] Glad to see it wasn’t just programmers who could forget stuff…
I get the impression from the IRJ story that the “24 trains per hour” were the peak capacity for both bores together; 12 trains per hour presumably with CBTC in each bore. I do not know if that is assuming passenger trains running at the stated 125 mph speed… which would cut down the effective ‘dwell time’ of even a long consist to a few seconds each.
I guess I agree, especially since this line handles both freight and passenger trains. Perhaps the freights are ‘fleeted’ and/or run at night. Where are our European correspondents when you need them? [*-)]