Alpine tunnels transform European road travel – perhaps we could learn a thing or two from the continent
“The St Bernard is a high pass, opening late and closing early.
“It is one of the very few ways across this part of the Alps, and in summer the motorist may find himself behind strings of coaches and oil tankers climbing majestically in their lowest gears, at a rate which is slow, over-heating and exceedingly tedious for a holiday car. At the end of the summer the pass grows dangerous, as the wild gusts hurl great masses of snow about, and poor workers who are returning late to Italy after the Swiss season are often overwhelmed.”
This Autocar description should make modern drivers very grateful for the Great St Bernard Tunnel, and indeed the Mont Blanc Tunnel just a few miles west on the French-Italian border, both of which were bored in the early 1960s, “certainly drawing Italy closer to the rest of Europe by land communications”.
The idea for an underground road connection between the ski resort of Chamonix and the Aosta Valley dated back to at least 1937, when Autocar first reported on plans to “move Paris and Rome 120 miles or so closer to one another”, as motorised vehicles grew rapidly more numerous.
France and Italy fighting a war against one another rather complicated matters, so an agreement on boring through Europe’s tallest mountain wasn’t reached until 1949 – and not ratified by both parliaments until 1957.
The tunnel was set to be 7.4 miles long and 7.0 metres wide and take three years to finish, with the total shared cost projected at nearly £7m (or £145m in today’s money). Meanwhile, the complementary 3.4-mile Great St Bernard Tunnel was going to be funded in its £6.5m entirety by private enterprise – and carry not just vehicles but also a new pipeline delivering crude oil from the seaport of Genoa to a refinery up in Collombey-Muraz.
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Boring on the Italian sides of both started in 1958, with the builders entering an informal race – in which the Mont Blanc team soon fell behind, due to internal flooding. “Inhabitants of the Aosta Valley are claiming that this confirms the legend that there are subterranean lakes and hidden deposits of uranium and precious metals in this mountain,” noted Autocar.
Their rivals won by a month, as in April 1962 “a strong blast of explosive removed a few feet of rock separating Italy from Switzerland, and opened a new route between southern and northern Europe”.
“Before the final charge, a small hole was drilled through from the Italian side, and Italian wine was piped to Swiss colleagues, who responded by feeding back cigarettes” – treats they had certainly earned, as “grave engineering difficulties had been encountered”.
We elaborated: “The mountain is superficially made of the best kinds of rock, but inside there proved to be a lot of rotten stuff and cracked strata, and far more water than had been expected. At one bad patch, the Italian engineers took about six months for 300 yards or so.”
It was finally opened to traffic in March 1964, “a very special Fiat 2300S with Pininfarina coupé bodywork, built for the occasion, first through from the south”, while “from the north there was a convoy of British cars”, which had arrived from Southend via Geneva aboard a British United Air Ferries Carvair.
These aircraft – successors to the Silver City Bristol Freighters that had taken drivers across the Channel in the 1950s – enabled a driver to escape London for the Mediterranean in just three hours and at a cost of about £30 (£540 now).
A third Alpine connection was announced at the inauguration of the Mont Blanc Tunnel in 1965, due to link Turin to southern France through the Mercantour Massif. At 7.5 miles long, it was expected to take five years and cost £14m.
Construction began in 1974 and the Fréjus Road Tunnel was opened in May 1980 – and upstaged months later by the Gotthard Road Tunnel in southern central Switzerland, burrowing beneath the “tortuous climb over the 6900ft St Gotthard Pass that used to cause many a boiling radiator in summer”.
We concluded: “There will soon be motorway virtually all the way from northern Germany to the southern tip of Italy” – a prospect that is now our reality, meaning Reggio Calabria is a day away by car, when it should really be two. Three cheers for civil engineers.
