The World’s Longest Tunnel #megaprojects

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]2 km beneath the Swiss Alps, a train is moving at 250 km per hour.

[00:00:07]Above it, mountains taller than skyscrapers, millions of tons of rock, and passengers barely notice. This is the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the longest [music] railway tunnel ever built.

[00:00:20]57.1 km of precision engineering.

[00:00:25]But here's what makes it extraordinary.

[00:00:26][music] An entire country voted to build it. It cost over 12 billion dollars. It took 17 years to complete.

[00:00:35]Nine workers lost [music] their lives.

[00:00:38]And at one point, engineers drilling from opposite ends of the Alps had to meet perfectly, 57 [music] km apart, with only centimeters of margin for error. If they missed, the consequences would have been enormous. So, how do you drill through one of the [music] most unpredictable mountain ranges on Earth without collapsing it, flooding it, or letting