This incredible £21.1 billion new high-speed rail megaproject will link the twin European cities of Milan and Paris and drastically cut journey times for passengers, allowing road travel to become more competitive with air travel.
The Turin-Lyon high-speed rail line, about 170 miles long, will link the Italian and French rail networks. The only international section construction has begun will cross the Alps through the Mont d’Ambin base tunnel, which connects the Susa Valley in Piedmont with Maurienne in Savoie.
The 37.5-mile tunnel will be the longest rail tunnel in the world, surpassing the 35.3-mile Gotthard Base Tunnel through the Swiss Alps.
The total cost of the route is estimated at €25 billion (£21.2 billion), with €8 billion (£6.7 billion) for the international sector alone.
The network has several objectives: firstly, to shift freight transport across the Alps from road to rail, reducing carbon dioxide emissions and local air pollution, and secondly, to enable faster passenger transport and reduce air traffic.
The new line’s maximum gradient will be 12.5 percent compared to 30 percent on the old line, and its maximum elevation will be 580 meters instead of 1,388 meters before, and its curves will be much wider. This will allow heavy freight trains to travel at 62 mph and passenger trains at 140 mph, significantly reducing journey times, energy use and costs.
This will reduce passenger travel times from Milan to Paris from seven hours to just four, making the network time-competitive with air travel.
However, it should be noted that despite the popular name, the line is not high speed by the European Commission’s definition: the design speed is 12 percent lower than the 155 mph standard the European Commission uses to define high speed rail. The line is therefore part of the TEN-T Trans-European conventional rail network within the “Mediterranean Corridor”.
The European Union is covering 40 percent of the tunnel’s costs and has indicated it wants to increase that to 55 percent, as well as provide financial assistance if access to France goes beyond simply upgrading existing infrastructure, according to telt.eu.
The new ashlar plant (thin, squared, shaped stones) in La Chapelle, France, is due to start up in June 2024 and will serve lot 2 of the base tunnel. The segments weighing 10 tonnes will be produced for the tunnel lining and are the result of an innovative process based on extreme automation and the utmost attention to sustainability.
While a standard factory would take 10 minutes to produce a segment, the new plant can do it in just five and a half minutes, which according to webuildgroup.com, translates into the production of 160 items per day.
The project has been criticized for a number of reasons. The town council of Similin, a French town that would be divided in two by the railway, has opposed the plans since 1992, with the former mayor saying that economic instability was damaging to the area. The Italian anti-TAV movement began in the Susa Valley in 1990, questioning the value, cost and safety of the project.
Other criticisms focus on the cost as a result of the fact that traffic in the area was declining at the time the project was decided upon, and the argument that flying is still faster than the full route, including round trip times to the airport and security checks.
Civil work began in 2002, with tunnel digging to construct access points and conduct geological surveys. According to Le Dauphin, 5.6 miles of tunnel was dug from Saint-Martin-de-la-Porte towards Italy in 2016, and was completed in September 2019. The expected completion date for the foundation tunnel is set for late 2022, with a target date of 2032.
