Europe's New High-Speed Rail Network Making Good Progress
- Editor OGN Daily
- Oct 2
- 2 min read
The world's longest railway tunnel just saw light at both ends.
A giant drill just broke through a section of rock to complete a tunnel connecting Austria to Italy 1,400 meters (nearly 4,600 feet) beneath the Alps, marking a major milestone in a series of ambitious European Union infrastructure projects that will radically speed up passenger train travel between metropolitan centres and shift freight off the roads and onto more environmentally friendly rails.
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni and Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker were on hand for the ceremonial breakthrough of the final meter of rock opening the first tunnel beneath the Brenner Pass, a key junction in an EU rail project that will one day run from Helsinki in Finland to Palermo in Sicily. That's a distance of 2,326 miles (3,743 km) as the crow flies, and services are expected to start operating in 2032.
“In the end, there is no project that is too big to be tackled, there is no project too big for us to bet on,’' Meloni said at the ceremony.
The 8.8 billion euro Brenner Base Tunnel, which will be the longest underground rail tunnel in the world at 34 miles (55km) when completed, is among four key infrastructure projects that promise to reshape how Italians travel and ship goods by the early 2030s, while bringing Europe closer together.
Tunnels will cut travel times between Verona and Munich by more than half to 2.5 hours, between Milan and Paris by around a third to 4½ hours and put the Ligurian port city of Genoa within commuting distance of Italy’s finance and fashion capital - significantly redrawing the Europe transit map.
