The longest railway tunnel in Belgium is that of Braine le Compte,
641 metres (705 yards). It cost £46 a metre. There are altogether
eighteen tunnels along the 15½ miles of picturesque line of railway
between Liege and Verviers; they are all short, none exceeding 400
metres in length; their cost was exactly £50 a metre forward. There is
only one long tunnel in Switzerland, that of Hauenstein near Olten,
on the railway between Basle and Berne, its length is 2,731 yards,
and, notwithstanding the numerous difficulties which attended its
construction, its cost was only £80 per yard. It might be expected
that in an undulating country like Switzerland there would be a great
many tunnels on its railways; such, however, is not the case, the
larger proportion of the railways are constructed in the comparatively
level valleys, and when engineers come upon rough ground, as a rule,
they prefer stiff gradients to very expensive works. This, however is
not always the case; witness the passage of the Jura from Pontarlieu
towards Neufchatel; here there is the combination of expensive works
with a steep ascending and then a steep falling gradient. These might
have been greatly alleviated, if not altogether avoided, by a tunnel of
comparatively short length; the engineer, it is said, wished to erect
for himself, in this work, a monument _perennius ære_. He has succeeded.
The longest tunnel upon a railway in Italy, now open for traffic, is
on the Giovi incline, near Genoa, 3,225 yards, or five yards over two
miles. The longest of the two on the Brachia pass of the Apennines,
between Pistoja and Poretta, is (as already stated) 3,300 yards; the
length of the next longest, on the same pass, is 2,860 yards. A tunnel
longer by a few yards than that on the Giovi incline, is in process of
construction on the branch which is to connect Naples by a direct line
with the Adriatic. The tunnel Maggioni, between Florence and Rome, is
1,170 metres (1,287 yards) long.
The natural undulatory, in many places almost mountainous, character of
Spain, has rendered necessary the construction of numerous tunnels on
Spanish Railways. The following is an abridgment of much interesting
information on this subject, published by the Spanish Government last
summer, and translated into French a few weeks ago.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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