After 27 years within budget Austria open 6thlongest railway tunnel in the world

https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railway-lines/southern-line-vienna-villach/koralm-railway

138•fzeindl•2h ago

Comments

roflmaostc•1h ago

In case you wonder, the Koralm Tunnel has a length of 32.9km

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel

tomw1808•46m ago

"The Koralm Tunnel opened on the 14th of December 2025" ... wikipedia living in the future past :)

roflmaostc•43m ago

Haha, check who updated this article. Only afterwards I realized we're not past the 14th yet...

teraro•42m ago

Already fixed!

the_mitsuhiko•1h ago

I really waited for this since I was a child. It’s fascinating to see it actually be here.

franciscop•1h ago

This headline is a bit odd and doesn't represent the original title nor article content. What does "within budget" mean here? That it costed what the original budget set out to cost? Couldn't find anything related to the budget within the article.

fzeindl•59m ago

It is mostly within budget, estimated in 2005 were 5.5 billion €, total cost as of today are 5.9 billion €, the difference being largely attributed to the pandemic and later addition of sections.

franciscop•52m ago

Sure, I'm just pointing out that this article doesn't follow the HN Guidelines, so I was confused at not seeing any mention of the budget within the article:

> "Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important."

> "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize"

fzeindl•50m ago

Agreed, it was just important to me to point it out, since staying within such a massive budget on such a long timeline is a rare achievement.

bigbinary•43m ago

Considering the original title is just the name of the railway, and I do not think “within budget” is editorializing, I think the commenter is being overly pedantic

franciscop•30m ago

I opened the article expecting to see news about the budget and how they stayed within it, since that SEEMS like the biggest surprising news in a project like this. How is that overly pedantic?

jfoster•5m ago

You're using a strange definition of "within". It's 7% over.

oniony•49m ago

To contrast, HS2 here in the UK has cost £40 billion (€45 billion) to date with a further £25 billion (€28 billion) allocated, for a largely superterranean route of 230km.

monster_truck•36m ago

7x longer for 11x the cost seems pretty good all things considered.

Always thought it seemed like a waste to not also dig out a bunch of storage while we're down there. I'm sure there are good reasons we don't

oniony•35m ago

It's not seven times longer. The Austrian line is 130km with 50km of tunnels.

            Length  Tunnels  Bridges   Stations   Cost
    Koralm  130km   ~50km    100       12         €6b
       HS2  230km   ~75km    100+      4          €74b+

Obviously this does not give any indication of the complexity of each project. Tunnelling and building railway through a metropolis I would imagine is quite challenging.

shevy-java•21m ago

Still seems insanely more expensive in the UK. I understand they have a higher cost to carry because their project is indeed more complex, but that's like a almost 13x more expensive variant, while not even being two times the length.

IshKebab•32m ago

Yeah because it would be extremely expensive and we don't need it.

stephen_g•33m ago

As badly as HS2 has been run, apart from the tunnel length (where HS2 has not too much more than this project) these projects are night and day different. Not just that HS2 Phase 1a/1b is almost double the length and significantly higher design speed (360km/h vs 250km/h), but they are in a different league in terms of civil engineering from the info I can see - this seems to have less than 80 structures (overpasses, bridges, underpasses etc.) whereas HS2 has 175 bridges and 52 viaducts, and some of those are massive (including the longest railway viaduct in the UK).

cjrp•28m ago

> this seems to have less than 80 structures (overpasses, bridges, underpasses etc.) whereas HS2 has 175 bridges and 52 viaducts.

Doesn't tunnel beat any of those structures in terms of cost/complexity?

georgefrowny•18m ago

Not necessarily because no one lives underground and there are probably no existing things like property, gas lines, electricity lines, sewers, pipelines, roads, etc to avoid or reroute. And very little in the way of habitat.

The longest road tunnel in the world only cost about 100 million in the 90s for 25km so tunneling isn't always a gigantic Big Dig style clusterfuck.

In terms of legal complexity, it's fantastically easier than picking your way across and near thousands of individual plots of very expensive land owned by people with solicitors salivating at the potential fees, expensive private infrastructure, nature reserves and so on.

neerajk•16m ago

In contrast, the 2nd Ave Subway extension here in NY cost $4.5 billion for 2.9 km

RicoElectrico•59m ago

It was indeed built within 27 years:

https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...

saubeidl•59m ago

I know its a small nitpick, but I got unreasonably annoyed at the two "Financed by EU fund x" banners having different flag sizes, paddings, fonts etc.

How is there no unifying design language for these?

brnt•53m ago

Is there any design? It's just the flag and a title + subtitle.

Also, the EU is the most efficient government in terms of overhead, and having seen some of it up close not wasting time or money on "unifying design languages" for every single funding billboard is very much EU style. Just copy-paste by some local authority in Powerpoint in most cases, I bet.

wongarsu•37m ago

Looking at the modern iterations of the program guidelines for these programs, especially [1] and [2], you basically have to use the flag, the text over, under or to either side of the flag (your choice) in one of 6 fonts (Arial, Auto, Calibri, Garamond, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Ubuntu or Verdana), and have some rules for minimum distance, minimum size and proportionality. They absolutely could have made those two match visually. But each program offers premade banners that match the design criteria, and those don't always harmonize. As you say, nobody cared

1: https://hadea.ec.europa.eu/programmes/connecting-europe-faci...

2: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/3192a0ef-6bda...

3: https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/information-sources/log...

tasuki•10m ago

What are the funding billboards for, anyway? They're an eyesore, and it's all paid by us EU taxpayers anyway. They should say "financed by you", or better yet, not exist to begin with.

throwaway2037•53m ago

Do you mean these two?

https://image-service.web.oebb.at/infra/.imaging/default/dam...

djoldman•59m ago

Webcams!

https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...

throwaway2037•55m ago

First, this is a massive accomplishment. When I looked at the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Railway

... it looks like a multi-multi-multi-phase project. Hats off to making this work.

Second, I noticed how long it took to build this tunnel: Koralm Tunnel -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel

It is 33km, and it took from 2008 to 2025 to build it. That is a damn long time! The Toei Oedo line in Tokyo is 40+km and was built in about 10 years. My guess about the wild difference: The geoengineering of the Koralm Tunnel is way more complex, and/or the rock is much harder. Can anyone with experience in this area comment? I would like to learn more. I guess that most of central Tokyo is aluvial plains (Shanghai is similar), so you are basically digging through clay and sand -- easy stuff for modern tunnel boring machines.

nasmorn•34m ago

It is very strange that countries like Austria, Japan or Switzerland have some of the best rail systems in the world even though their bridge and tunnel requirements are huge. In the US building rail on any terrain seems to be more expensive than basically anything one can build in Austria.

kaon_2•26m ago

Not strange at all! If you want to go by car you must build even more tunnels. Mountainous regions favor rail just like urban areas do. Furthermore, 19th century investments into rail still pay off in mountainous regions, because once you build a railway bridge or tunnel, you are kind of dumb not to use it. In the USA competition from trucks or cars is much tougher.

epolanski•33m ago

Geography I guess[1].

Kanto is flat, it's the only region in Japan that could sustain feeding such a massive population and could allow building the first mega city on the planet.

Combine that with the massive engineering and rail experience Japanese have, and it's no surprise imho that combined with favorable geography they could build it quickly.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Topograp...

monster_truck•31m ago

The rock they dug through for Koralm is, no hyperbole, about as bad as it gets. It's the gnarliest part of what's under the Alps and required them switching back and forth between boring and blasting.

Being two separate tunnels, it also needs twice as much excavation work. It's also ~25x deeper than Toei Oedo (4000ft vs 157ft). At 4000ft the rock itself is 45-50C!

manarth•5m ago

The Koralm tunnel has a different temperature gradient, as the depth is a consequence of a mountain on top of the tunnel, rather than an increased proximity to the earth crust/core.

    > "The undisturbed rock temperature varies from 10 °C, in tunnel sections close to the portals, to 32 °C in the tunnel centre"

32°C is still a significant engineering concern, but not as consequential as 45–50°C.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088677982...

e12e•12m ago

I'm guessing geology play a big part - Japan is mostly "new" rock, Alps mostly "old".

apexalpha•47m ago

I thought this was about the new base tunnel under the Alps and was very confused for a bit.

MadDemon•25m ago

The Brenner base tunnel is still under construction.

flowerthoughts•30m ago

Actually, the tunnel itself was only 17 years:

1998: Start of construction of the Koralm Railway

2008: Start of construction of the Koralm Tunnel

2018: Breakthrough Koralm Tunnel

2020: Final Koralm tunnel breakthrough

2025: This announcement (https://orf.at/stories/3414173/ in German)

https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...

DeathArrow•19m ago

While staying within budget for infrastructure developments is no small achievement these days and I applaud them for it, 27 years seems a bit much.

tasuki•15m ago

> Crossing the Koralpe massif more quickly and with more comfort. That’s what the future of train travel from Graz to Klagenfurt looks like. With the Koralm Railway, you will arrive at your destination even quicker. The fastest connection will shrink from three hours to just 45 minutes.

There aren't any big mountains between Graz and Klagenfurt. It's an hour on the Autobahn. That it took three hours by train... well, they just had shitty railroad? Best of luck, Southern neighbors!

buybackoff•3m ago

Just yesterday B1M published an interesting video about the future longest tunnel between Lyon, France and Turin, Italy. It will be more than 50km, deeply below the Alps. The project has finally secured funding, from both countries and EU, and is on track.

https://youtu.be/NFrr-L_BcC4?si=vhTuzwsPPPxa1Xio

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