After 27 years within budget Austria open 6thlongest railway tunnel in the world
36 comments
·December 12, 2025franciscop
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
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.
oniony
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.
stephen_g
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).
monster_truck
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
franciscop
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
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.
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RicoElectrico
It was indeed built within 27 years:
https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...
roflmaostc
In case you wonder, the Koralm Tunnel has a length of 32.9km
tomw1808
"The Koralm Tunnel opened on the 14th of December 2025" ... wikipedia living in the future past :)
roflmaostc
Haha, check who updated this article. Only afterwards I realized we're not past the 14th yet...
teraro
Already fixed!
the_mitsuhiko
I really waited for this since I was a child. It’s fascinating to see it actually be here.
DeathArrow
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.
throwaway2037
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.
monster_truck
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!
epolanski
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...
nasmorn
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
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.
apexalpha
I thought this was about the new base tunnel under the Alps and was very confused for a bit.
MadDemon
The Brenner base tunnel is still under construction.
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saubeidl
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
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
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...
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...