Portal:Trains/Selected article/Week 42, 2020

The New Railway Link through the Alps (NRLA) (German: Neue Eisenbahn-Alpentransversale, NEAT, French: nouvelle ligne ferroviaire à travers les Alpes, NLFA, Italian: Nuova ferrovia transalpina, NFTA), is a Swiss construction project for faster north-south rail links across the Swiss Alps. It includes base tunnels several hundred metres below the existing apex tunnels along two axes, the Gotthard and the Lötschberg. The 57-kilometre (35 mi) Gotthard Base Tunnel and the 35-kilometre (22 mi) Lötschberg Base Tunnel are the respective centers of those two axes. Swiss Federal Railways subsidiary AlpTransit Gotthard AG and BLS AG subsidiary BLS Alp Transit AG (now BLS Netz AG) were founded for this project and built the tunnels. The Gotthard Base Tunnel opened on 1 June 2016, and became operational on 11 December of that year. The 15-kilometre (9.3 mi) Ceneri Base Tunnel was opened on 3 September 2020 and becomes fully operational in December 2020 and will become an important feeder for the Gotthard Base Tunnel. Work on the completion of the second tube of the Lötschberg Base Tunnel is expected to start in 2021/2022 for a targeted opening towards the end of 2028.

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