Switzerland bores underground | Hacker News Reader

Switzerland bores underground

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56 pointsOsiris3045 comments

"According to a study conducted under the leadership of the Federal Office for Spatial Development, the new alpine tunnel will hardly relieve any pressure on the roads but instead create new rail traffic, as the newspaper “Der Bund” reports."

Isn't the environmental impact of 1000 people traveling from point A to point B via rail far preferable to than 1000 people making the same journey by car? The quote above seems to imply that rail provides no appreciable environmental benefit, I'm finding that hard to believe.

What they're saying is that there will be just as many cars on the road as before and therefore not reducing the environmental impact of the road.

I imagined it to be something like this:

Old:

- Road: 1000 users

- Train tunnel: 1000 users

New:

- Road: 1000 users

- Train: 2000 users

Although the train is more environmentally friendly than the road, I think the article is saying the impact of adding it is just that more people make the trip rather than the same number of people doing it in a more environmentally friendly way. This is basically the concept of induced demand i.e. build it and they will come.

Am i reading right ? 17b € for a 57km tunnel (on an existing railway, only to flatter trajectory a little) just to save a little time ? That seems expensive..

that is Switzerland :D

Consider that above the tunnel there are the Alps.

What else should a society, that has almost everything, invest in? It's not like they are neglecting anything for it, they literally sit on gold.

By that logic you could just tax less. That was definitely not the reason this was built.

I was referring to society, not the Swiss state. I don't think that they could have spend that money better individually. The tunnel will be there for a while, so you have to write off these billions over decades. After you divide the remaining by a few million Swiss people, there isn't much money left.

Decades? Why not centuries!

The trajectory is flatter with the new tunnel and freight trains can be longer and carry more weight. This is one of the elements in trying to shift more freight from the street to the trains (which is one of the two points of the Alpen-Initiative, a popular initiative from 1994 to protect the Alpine Environment).

Except that, according to the article, it doesn't really shift traffic, but creates more of it.

Well, that is not jet clear. Either are not bad situations and don't make the investment bad.

I'm not sure whether the environment thinks the same about that. (As long as only train traffic increases, it should be fine, as that uses electricity from water power in Switzerland. Not so for car traffic, which should ideally decrease unless it becomes electric.)

Yes, that's true. But it came into being as part of the actions taken to satisfy the initiative.

Time is money. :)

Also, this tunnel probably increases transportation capacity as well.

The old rail route through the Gotthardt pass runs in a set of vertical spirals to achieve the vertical elevation.

This megalink shows, I hope, a Google Maps 3D rendering of the pass and the rail route:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/Schwyz,+Switzerland/Locarn...

Note that the big loops are inside the mountain.

We have some absurdly long (3-4.2km) freight trains in Canada, and they go through systems like this all the time. You can see the front of the train at the top of the mountain while the bottom is still going in!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_(railway)

"Just a little" reduction in grade can mean quite a lot. The grade on a typical staircase is about 60%--for every meter of horizontal distance, the staircase rises 60 cm. In terms of hiking, one trail I went downhill had a persistent 30% grade for 1.5km or so, very much to the complaint of my knees. A persistent 10% grade would usually be considered quite strenuous for hiking.

For roads, the maximum permissible grade is lower. The steepest road in the world is about 37% grade; the exit on a highway signed "Truckers: DO NOT USE" was 13% grade. In general, anything above about 5% grade requires excessive grade warning signs.

Railroads have even stricter grade tolerances. The original B&O used "inclined planes" (effectively stationary locomotives providing extra pulling power) to navigate the tortuous 5% grade in Mt. Airy. This was quickly replaced with a 1.5% grade loop and eventually a tunnel (.8% grade). In general, freight railroads like the max grade to be around .5-1%, although mountainous terrain is usually not so forgiving (most of the major passes in the Rocky Mountains run about ~2-2.5% grade). The steeper grades require either extra locomotives to be put on the trains or the weight of the trains to be drastically reduced.

I've seen trucks (tractor-trailers) with flames coming from the brakes on 6% grades downhill... and the uphill sides of those the trucks are in low gear at high RPM doing 15-20mph MAX, running at 3-4x the rpm they'd run doing 75 on the highway... people underestimate grade and the effect it has on heavy vehicles

The maximum commercially viable (due to weight restriction) grade for freight railroads is 2.2% ...

If you want some hard numbers on why high grade is so problematic:

When you're pulling something along a road or a railtrack on level ground, the primary force you need to overcome is rolling friction, which is proportional to µ×N, where µ is in the range of 0.001 (rail) to 0.01 (road) and N is the normal force against the surface. For a 10 kN car (that's about 1000 kilos), this means that you need a force of about 10 N for a railcar. When you go up an incline, the rolling friction decreases according to the cosine of the angle, but now you need to overcome gravity--and this amount goes up by the sine of the angle. A measly 2% grade requires pulling a force of about 210 N, a factor of 21×.

Basically, grade really kills because you actually have to counteract gravity as opposed to friction.

First, thanks! I genuinely appreciate that knowledge, I'd have never looked it up on my own..

Second... why's gravity gotta be such a dick? :)

The maximum commercially viable (due to weight restriction) grade for freight railroads is 2.2% ...

A 2.2% grade seems insignificant to the average person, but to a freight train it is no laughing matter. Here's a serious derailment that happened in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_train_disaster#...

At that grade it's not sufficient to use brakes in the individual rail cars, it's also necessary to use dynamic braking by turning electric traction motors into generators, then dissipating energy in giant resistive grids.

Heavy investment in transport seems quite natural in a country where many settlements would be virtually unreachable without impressive projects. Smaller projects, very much unlike a Basistunnel, but still magnitudes more expensive than just paving over a dirt road. If you have seen the love, respect and money the Swiss allocate to maintain their awesome Postbus and conventional rail networks, a few billion to solve transit with tunnels do not seem terribly surprising anymore.

Appears to be down and I couldn't find a cached copy.

The original title is "Switzerland bores underground". I'm fine with a different title, but please replace "it's" with "its". Thanks, and sorry for nitpicking.

When I saw the title and the domain I knew the title had been changed because no average Swiss would do such a stupid mistake as to get its and it's confused

It is indeed a mistake that is almost only made by native English speakers, which is in itself an interesting phenomenon.

IMHO it's because you learn your first language spoken first, written after -- and most people learn further languages after they learned writing, so they can learn to differentiate between words that sound similar/same.

Another hypothesis could be that in the culture surrounding other languages (as Russian or German) grammar and spelling mistakes are much more frowned upon than in the English-speaking countries.

Anti-intellectualism in general is an old and interesting phenomenon in English-speaking countries.

Perhaps it's because native English speakers more frequently communicate with English-speaking people in an informal setting (where such mistakes happen more often and are copied), whereas non-native speakers tend to read English mostly in edited publications etc. and (more sloppily) communicate with friends in their native language.

While it is true that yes, people in general communicate more sloppily in informal settings it doesn't mean they don't know the formal way of writing (at least for common terms)

German dialects are pretty far from the "official" language, but everybody knows that

You're assuming its vs it's is always due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes it's just a brainfart.

I noticed today that I had sent an email that used the wrong form of "to" ("too" instead). This isn't because I don't know English. It's just that what came out of my fingers was wrong. Mea culpa, it happens.

The way English uses the apostrophe is especially tedious and offers no value: it'd be no real shame if the distinction between "its" and "it's" disappeared over time, just like English lost gendered nouns and words like thy and thine.

Oh brainfarts and autocorrects do happen, but by the frequency I see this mistake happening I see it's not just a regular slip

You probably see a lot more English than other languages, so you'll see a proportionally higher number of mistakes too.

Note that even people who fully know correct usage do type the wrong thing now and then. It's particularly easy to do when you're basically transcribing a sentence that you're verbalizing silently to type the wrong homonym. I very rarely to never mix up things like loose and lose but I will mistype things like its and it's from time to time even though I fully know the correct one.

Thanks for nitpicking. I'm always tempted to do this, but reluctant because most people probably don't care. I'm a firm believer in the hypothesis that such mistakes are "contagious" and thus more harmful than one would think.

They are indeed. I find myself inadvertently typing "loose" when I mean "lose" and it's absolutely maddening.

Similarly, I do a double-take when I see "effect" used properly.

The problem is that English overloads the apostrophe for possession and contraction. It's annoying.

The amount of traffic they're getting from that Newsletter will look insane on their dashboard.

URL has : ?utm_source=Newsletter42016&utm_medium=E-Mail

It would do if the site was up. HN hug of death?

It was sluggish, but I did get through.

Archive: http://archive.is/AdZrF

Should it be "its" instead of "it's" in the title?

At least that's the way they taught me English in high school (in Italy).

It is, is it?

...but above ground, they're killing

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