AN ALPINE TUNNEL

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 79, 30 September 1938, Page 4

AN ALPINE TUNNEL

SIX YEARS BUILDING

ENGINEERS CELEBRATE

Swiss railway engineers—the men who burrow, tunnel, and gnaw their r- way through the rock and ice of the Alps like mites wandering through a' cheese —have been celebrating the i. twenty-fifth anniversary of the open:e ing of the Loetschberg Tunnel, which,- -- with the better-known Simplon, links the Channel ports with Milan, writes 3. H. L. McNally in the "Daily Mail." e I have just completed a tour of the ■}■ Bernese Alpine railway. In- four days I have sweltered in temperaj_ tures over 100 degrees, been hailed on j" at Gornergrat, where the highest ci open-air railway in Europe reaches a :z height of 10,290ft, and been snowed on at Jungfraujoch, which is 11,340ft high ," —so high that an egg takes ten min:o utes to boil. >■ The- Jungfrau herself provided me s- with a strip-tease act beneath ; her veil r" of clouds of tantalising but incomparl" able beauty. I shall not forget meeting Bernard Shaw's Captain Bluntschli in the person of Dr. Seller of n Zermatt, who owns 2400 beds in his 0 chain of ' Alpine hotels, and is the n only man I ever met who owns a r glacier—the Rhone Glacier,- one of the finest in Switzerland, in which there *» is an artificial cave 100 yards long and lf 10ft high, cut in the ice. Switzerland in the summer has a special charm —the charm of contrast. ; Electric rack railways wind and climb slowly, but steadily, up from i, the sun-baked valleys; up through the •s pines thousands of feet to where gentian, even bluer than the sky, and 1- other many-coloured Alpine flowers 1- grow; up to cool refreshing air where l" patches of last year's snow lie around ~. defying the sunshine, e PROTECTING THE FISH. x I have funny memories too. I ' think of Blausee, whose water is so >> blue that one imagines the lake must be closed annually for re-blueing. I \; recollect that this little lake—surrounded by IOOOft-high rock cliffs h down which water cascades in streams e that look like white . smoke—is the » home of thousands of blue trout, so 1 tame that a notice says: "It is forbic h den to take the fish out of the water. The -electric train carried me away e from Blausee through tunnel after, tunnel, until I rached the Loetschberg Tunnel. A searchlight revealed, as „ we sped at 56 miles an hour, the vast rock-blasting that had been done. » Seventy-four million france—about ■> £3 000,000—were spent on the line, and £1,500,000 on the tunnel alone, i It was planned that the tunnel would :s take 4} years to build, but an avalanche which killed 12 men and m--3, lured 15, and a roof collapse which n buried 25 workmen, made it necessary !t to divert the tunnel to avoid a danL" gerous- fault in the rock. The work '• took six years and nine months, and u traffic began in July, 1913, , , M Bittel, engineer of the line, tola 1 me of the opening of the tunnel AH ' Switzerland took part," he said. Cane nonades of joy were fired, chamois " hunters, guides, and people in local costumes attended from every part. Ministers representing foreign Governments were there when, at noon, mines were exploded and the new international link was open." INTERNATIONAL WORK. |. '"The tunnel was an international ■ en- ' terprise. French money, Swiss and Italian technicians, ; designers,- : and . workmen.all c'oropera^ed in .this; work which Switzerland planned to aid.lri^, f ternational friendship and tourist traf- - fie. It was so popular that the tram £'services had to be doubled, fromthe i first day." . . . : ."/.'" ; Out of the tunnel—whose nine miles ; the train covers in fifteen;minutes--we were running high over, the Rhone 3 Valley, looking down on ; the ; rule- { straight poplar-lined road to Brigue r which was first laid out by-Napoleon ' as the route to Italy. \ Kandersteg, best known in winter, was full of visitors who had' gathered I" bunches of AJpine flowers, now in full • bloom. For a moment I paused at the l cemetery where the men who died in .'. the building of the Loetschberg are j buried —the men who made my trip possible. I should have liked to stay at the Ritz in Niederwald, for it is the ori- : ginal Ritz, opened 300 years before - Cesar Ritz founded the hotels which f have made the name world-renowned, I but its four bedrooms were' full. . [ Rain was falling at Zermatt, but a , fine morning followed, and a rack 1 railway brought me above the pines, | past the blue gentians;'up to the snowy ■ Gornergrat, where the temperature > was at frelzing point. On the summit I found myself sur- '■ rounded by the most awe-inspiring peaks: Monte Rosa, the Bfeithorn, the ' Matterhorn, and the Little Matter■_hojn. ; YOU CANNOT HURRY. Ten thousand feet up clouds swirled and drifted about me in a ;battle with the sunshine, and ominous-look-ing black daws with bright yellow beaks flew around seeming like small eagles. At this height', for anyone unaccustomed to it, it is. necessary to move slowly, even for a few paces. A quick walk of- ten yards- makes . the heart palpitate. . . ; . My highest climb was by" the Jungr fraujoch railway from -Scheidegg at 6770ft to the Jungfraujoch station at 11,340ft. Almost the whole of this line is tunnelled through the rock under the glaciers,- and the gradient is one in four most of the way.: : The five and three-quarter miles journey to the magnificent hotel which has been built in a seemingly impossible position at the top takes just an hour. There the Jungfrau (the Maiden) played, her strip-tease act. Fine snOw veiled her altogether as I went into the Ice Palace, a wonderful excavation in the glacier ice. There is a bar, comlete with piano, and "stove" made of ice, also a skating rink,. where one's breath settles as crystals of frost on the ice walls, and the exertion of a few rounds on skates is enough to make one out of breath. • ' - Back in the open again, the Maiden gave me my first glimpse; a cloud rested on the summit and others drifted around, letting me see one part and then another, but never the whole mountain. Tantalisingly, the summit remained invisible.