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Comment by hijp | Hacker News Reader

More pictures and a map: https://www.estunlar.fo/en/about-the-tunnels/the-eysturoy-tu...

It's amazing they did this in four years for $160mil while here in Hawaii our elevated rail broke ground in 2011, is going to cost between $9 and $13 billion, and is expected to be completed in 2033. Please send the construction team over here next...

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They've been working day and night! :)

A friend of mine was department lead at a concrete company, the company responsible for providing and pouring the concrete for the tunnel.

At times he had insane, practically 24-hour work days, for weeks on end. A lot of overtime payments, sure. But he never had any free time, and was "on call" all hours of the day.

We would be drinking a couple of beers, and halfway through his first one, his phone rings; duty calls, gotta go.

Thankfully, he quit back in May. Now he drives trucks for a furniture company.

That environment doesn't sound well managed or conducive to low-defect work to be honest.

It is also questionable as why this was preferred over just a tunnel or bridge between Strendur and Runavik along with linking the main road network to the other outlying islands like Svinoy, Fugloy, Kalsoy, Nolsoy, Mykines, Hester, etc. in addition to the bypassing of of the Stora and Litla Dimun islands by the proposed Suðuroy tunnel. Locals are not going to be happy about having to make a detour to an underwater roundabout tourist attraction when emergency services are needed; might as well name this the Tappan Zee of the Faroe.

It's a matter of economics. Passage will be tolled [1] and this particular tunnel is projected to make economic sense based on expected traffic.

Also, there's not much interest in a bridge/tunnel connecting Strendur and Runavík. That's not what the roundabout is for. Before the roundabout was proposed, there were debates whether the tunnel should surface in Strendur or Runavík. The roundabout is to connect both Strendur and Runavík to Tórshavn without either villagers having to circle around the fjord.

The other islands you mention are sparsely populated and have a hard time justifying the cost of subsea tunnels. Populations [2]:

  • Svínoy: 31
  • Fugloy: 38
  • Kalsoy: 75
  • Nólsoy: 224
  • Mykines: 16
  • Hestur: 18
  • Stóra Dímun: 10
  • Lítla Dímun: 0

[1] https://www.tunnil.fo/um-tunnil/eysturoyartunnilin/prisir/

[2] https://statbank.hagstova.fo/pxweb/en/H2/H2__IB__IB01/fo_vit...

Rail construction is more expensive because the loads are way higher - axle loads of 22-25 metric tons are common (https://www.forschungsinformationssystem.de/servlet/is/32505...), trucks are half to a third of that (usually 8t/axle, legal limit in Germany are 10t). The forces on the rails are also greater especially if higher speeds are involved - trucks here have a limit of 80 km/h and buses 100 km/h, whereas trains reach triple that.

But Hawaii is building a light metro system, with speeds of around 110km/h and an axle weight of about 10t (or less, I don't know how many axles there are).

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

I don't know what the axle weight is but each car weighs 32.6 metric tons and travel in trains of 4-cars, the top speed is 88kmh (48kmh average).

https://planning.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/HART-presenta...

https://www.honolulutransit.org/inform/rail-facts#gsc.tab=0

*edit - decimal

You got the units wrong - 72.000 lbs is ~32 metric tons. Assuming carriages with two separate axle pairs that's 8 tons per axle, if two adjacent carriages share one axle pair a 4-carriage train has 5 pairs / 10 axles in total for a load of 128 tons it's 12.8 tons/axle.

Still, neither is something to take lightly (pun not intended), and I guess that building elevated makes construction a good chunk more expensive.

Whoops, missed a zero when putting it into google perhaps.

Here's the Hitachi Rail page with the trains, looks like four per car. http://italy.hitachirail.com/en/honolulu_381.html

So at 8 tons per axle its still within OP's truck limit.

Anyway I'm just kvetching because our 20-mile light rail is taking 22-years to build, is half complete, and a billion dollars over budget (as of now).

More expensive than tunneling under the Atlantic?

These pictures are rederings though.

Sure but from the main article I couldn't tell why they needed an underwater roundabout in the first place.

The Eysturoy tunnel is an Y-shaped tunnel, connecting three islands of the Faroe. (Edit: Not entirely true, as two of the mouths are actually on different peninsulas of the same island Eysturoy.)

I guess they could have chosen to dig 2 different tunnels, but that would probably have been more expensive because of the increase in kilometers, seeing how long they dig under land at the mouths in order for the tunnel to be deep enough at the banks/shores.

This article has photographs of the roundabout itself being decorated by a local artist:

https://portal.fo/dagur-36150/myndir-listaverkid-hja-trondi-...

I love that each exit has a different colour light. The neon lights in themselves strike me as rather tacky, but knowing you usually drive from the blue exit to the green exit is super useful and user friendly.

> The neon lights in themselves strike me as rather tacky [...]

I think this might also just be an effect of the fake high dynamic range on the pictures (i.e. a rather large amount of color bleed from an underexposed slice of the image was artificially enlarged to make it "pop" more).

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