If your train can’t go over or around a mountain, it needs to go through it. The long and short of tunnels,Tunnel Vision,If your train can’t go over or around a mountain, it needs to go through it. The long and short of tunnels
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W hat do you do when you want a railroad to go from one place to another but there’s a mountain in the way? The train can’t go over the mountain. It can’t go around it. Sometimes there’s no choice but to go through the mountain!
Recently the longest railroad tunnel in the world opened in Switzerland. Called the Gotthard Tunnel (for the name of the mountain it goes through) the tunnel runs over 35 miles right through the middle of the Swiss Alps.
In honor of this great engineering achievement Jr. takes a deeper look at tunnels: tunnels for travel for war for escape and more…
As you can imagine the biggest tunnel has big numbers to go with it: It cost $10 billion and took 17 years to build construction crews working around the clock in three shifts. An international project it employed thousands of workers most of them not Swiss but Italians Germans Austrians Portuguese and others.
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