Koralm Railway
infrastruktur.oebb.at
infrastruktur.oebb.at
1998: Start of construction of the Koralm Railway
2008: Start of construction of the Koralm Tunnel
2018: Breakthrough Koralm Tunnel
2020: Final Koralm tunnel breakthrough
2025: This announcement (https://orf.at/stories/3414173/ in German)
https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...
Seems software neckbeards on HN are equally as guilty of underestimating the difficulty of other people's work like the managers they complain about.
Seems like a great project outcome. Mostly within budget, no political chaos due to delays (AFAICT) and allowing several months for testing before announcing it open.
I'd be a bit nervous, going through a long tunnel, in a region known for vulcanism and earthquakes.
A tunnel is actually the least likely to shake; if you shake a jello with fruit inside it, the surface moves a lot but the interior fruit won’t move all that much.
You don't hear that much about great engineering projects today, yet it's still an incredible feat to build those.
Here's a great engineering project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_test_tunnel
At first that's a really odd sounding choice to this Hoosier. Turns out it's 1/3 of standard 50 Hz in Europe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_kV_AC_railway_electrificati...
My high school physics is not sufficient to really understand it.
The only options to get around was the expensive train system - and anyone I asked was bewildered why I would want to take a bus.. Maybe next time I should look in to carpooling or some other options. How do low income people get around typically? I need to go to attend a conference, but it's not cheap coming from Asia
EDIT: Seems I was wrong! Sorry. There are buses, (maybe fewer than other countries?)
There are various discount membership plans available that sometimes pay for themselves after just one round-trip or even one-way ride, and on the most popular connections there's now a private operator competing with the state-owned railway.
A yearly flat-rate ticket for intercity trains is also relatively affordable for EUR 1400 per year.
Thank you for the info!
Not always true. The Graz-Vienna(Airport) trip is often quicker by flixbus than by OBB train.
Trains in Austria are quite slow , often travelling at the same speed as cars on the highway or often times even slower.
Graz–Vienna is admittedly a bit of a special case, since the railway tunnel there isn't finished yet, so I could see cars/buses being faster. (The train makes up for that in views, though ;)
And the train is even slower than that. Let that sink in.
>Graz–Vienna is admittedly a bit of a special case
Special case at being ripped off when flights from London, Paris or Berlin across the continent are cheaper than trains from Graz to Vienna.
>The train makes up for that in views, though ;)
It really doesn't when you factor in the ticket prices. Some people who are not tourists use transportation out of necessity to get from A to B as quickly and cheaply as possible, not to do sightseeing and die of old age, so speed and value for money is more critical than what you see out the window. And a significant part of the trip is through tunnels anyway.
And there's only so many times you can see the same hills and houses before it gets repetitive and you go back to your phone. Not to mention if you travel second class, trains on that route are typically full of loud obnoxious people talking on their phone on speaker mode, who don't have courtesy for others so it ruins any enjoyment of sightseeing unless you have good noise cancelling headphones.
A large part of Austria is the Alps, that poses special challenges for trains. That's why these base tunnels are so important. Funny you ignored the comment about the Semmering tunnel being built, and how it will help with the travel time on that section.
Flights are so cheap because they are subsidized (primarily the fuel), and their CO2 emissions are just swept under the rug. There is also this problem of not having enough high speed cross-country trains, and even if they exist, you usually have to change trains and book tickets separately for each country. The EU has a plan to improve on this in the next 20 years.
> trains on that route are typically full of loud obnoxious people talking on their phone on speaker mode, who don't have courtesy for others so it ruins any enjoyment of sightseeing unless you have good noise cancelling headphones.
Yes, because Ryanair or Wizzair flights never have loud obnoxious people...
A "Sparschiene" ticket from Vienna to Graz typically costs between 10€ and 25€. With the Vorteilscard, a regular ticket costs 22€. (I believe the full regular price only exists to rip off tourists :)
I've never seen it below 19 Euros.
Are Austrian residents excempt from the "full regular price"?
Then it's ripping me off too not just tourists.
Actually the entire country is a ripoff.
I randomly picked next Wednesday (December 17). There are several offers for 9,90€
> Are Austrian residents excempt from the "full regular price"?
No, and that would be against EU laws.
"Reverse discrimination" is generally legal under EU law.
For example, EU law grants the non-EU spouses of EU citizens living in an EU country other than the EU citizen's home country much broader right than the EU citizen's home country otherwise might.
Vienna-Graz is mainly slow because it has to cross the Semmering mountains and the tracks date back to the K&K days. This will change with the Semmering tunnel.
And talking about apples/oranges, let me add apples/bananas: Vienna to Budapest by train cost a lot when booking via öbb. And not a lot when booking via Regiojet.
The problem is the offers are all scattered around imho.
Prices are good only if you use it regularly as a commuter via a yearly subscription (Klimaticket), but for one off trips, prices are more expensive than flying.
Sparschiene tickets are very cheap. For example, Graz-Vienna (200 km) is between 10€ and 25€. How is that more expensive than flying!?
No voter in Austria would want it any other way.
Small county with small market monopolized by few politically connected local players in every major sector of the economy who sometimes enjoy regulatory protectionism from the government to keep foreign competitors out and turn a blind eye on racketeering practices.
That's how everything, including stuff made in Austria is more expensive than the same stuff sold in Germany even though wages are lower.
Same issues like in other small markets like New Zeeland except Austria being an EU member should have more pressure from free trade competition but that doesn't always work in favor of the consumers.
can be cheap when you book early. Vienna -> Graz -> Vienna: ~20€
Rail service is funded at the federal level, so there's less arguing about who pays for what. Bus service, however, is managed by regional transport associations funded by the provinces. This creates disincentives for cross-province bus routes because no single province wants to pay more than its 'fair' share for a service that primarily benefits voters in another province.
Similar dynamics play out at the city/province level. Take Linz, the provincial capital of Upper Austria: the city has had a social democratic (SPÖ) mayor continuously since 1945, while the province has had a conservative (ÖVP) governor for exactly the same period of 80 years. This disincentivizes the province government from helping to fund public transport within or into the city, because it's a win for social democratic city voters, while the more conservative rural voters would rather take the car anyway since they often can't do the whole trip by public transport.
Arguably the reason for the excellent public transport in the city of Vienna is that they are also their own province. Their mayor/governor, who has been a social democrat as well for the last 80 years, always controls both levels of funding.
https://www.der-postillon.com/2012/08/neue-zeitform-futur-ii...
The third attempt at a Dublin metro just got planning permission a few weeks ago; said planning is now bogged down in a judicial review.
Somewhat envious of Austria’s speed in this sort of thing, really…
Note that I have no confidence Colorado will tackle the issues driving costs up. Several of the known factors are places where politically powerful people (from all sides so don't bring in class warfare) are increasing costs and they let you cut them off. There are a lot of unkonwen issues left after factoring the above, and it is likely they also have politically powerful people increasing costs.
Federal non-defense spending in the US is as high as ever (ignoring the brief COVID spike) https://www.cato.org/blog/century-federal-spending-1925-2025
The i70 line will never happen.
My favorite from this part of Europe is the Bernina Express across the alps from Switzerland to Italy.
Definetly worth a slow tv watch if you love trains. (e.g. https://youtu.be/Mw9qiV7XlFs )
... it looks like a multi-multi-multi-phase project. Hats off to making this work.
Second, I noticed how long it took to build this tunnel: Koralm Tunnel -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel
It is 33km, and it took from 2008 to 2025 to build it. That is a damn long time! The Toei Oedo line in Tokyo is 40+km and was built in about 10 years. My guess about the wild difference: The geoengineering of the Koralm Tunnel is way more complex, and/or the rock is much harder. Can anyone with experience in this area comment? I would like to learn more. I guess that most of central Tokyo is aluvial plains (Shanghai is similar), so you are basically digging through clay and sand -- easy stuff for modern tunnel boring machines.
Population size, density, terrain, etc. have nothing to do with it.
Kanto is flat, it's the only region in Japan that could sustain feeding such a massive population and could allow building the first mega city on the planet.
Combine that with the massive engineering and rail experience Japanese have, and it's no surprise imho that combined with favorable geography they could build it quickly.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Topograp...
Being two separate tunnels, it also needs twice as much excavation work. It's also ~25x deeper than Toei Oedo (4000ft vs 157ft). At 4000ft the rock itself is 45-50C!
> "The undisturbed rock temperature varies from 10 °C, in tunnel sections close to the portals, to 32 °C in the tunnel centre"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088677982...
Assumed they would at least have their own air in the bits that didn't have aircon/ventilation while it was being built. They don't even need to do that anymore! The ventilation systems they used are as advanced and bespoke as the boring machines.
Because they were blasting too, they couldn't utilize full-face pressurization of the entire tunnel to maintain negative pressure to suck all of the fumes, dust, silicates, etc out like they would if it was only boring. That's 1-3kPa, "leaks are jets of air, can pull an airlock door closed hard enough to break bones" territory.
Instead, they have a bunch of dedicated supply and exhaust vents going to the surface (some up to 2m in diameter) and sets of connections between the two tunnels with huge axial fans. It allows them to selectively apply "slight" negative pressure to any of the individual segments when they need to clear them. 50Pa is ~10x what you encounter in a negative pressure highrise. It is described as a "constant slight breeze"
I found this short video on some of the safety features of the finished tunnel. It almost looks "too serious", like something out of a James Bond movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8trt96huf0
> Being two separate tunnels, it also needs twice as much excavation work.
Overall an amazing achievement, and unsurprising it took this long to figure out!
The Alps are very, very old in comparison.
https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000299789/traum-vom-sue...
How is there no unifying design language for these?
Also, the EU is the most efficient government in terms of overhead, and having seen some of it up close not wasting time or money on "unifying design languages" for every single funding billboard is very much EU style. Just copy-paste by some local authority in Powerpoint in most cases, I bet.
1: https://hadea.ec.europa.eu/programmes/connecting-europe-faci...
2: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/3192a0ef-6bda...
3: https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/information-sources/log...
Also, eyesore? What do you have against the EU flag?
Now I am sure that Austria has benefited from EU membership, but this is not one of the areas.
The funds are less useful if they're in the hands of our government.
Basically yoy bid to get some of your money back...
Which is much better than at the Austrian politics level.
I like the EU flag. I do not like the billboards. They just do not look good. Plant an actual flag there instead? I'd prefer that!
The idea is to show people the benefits of the EU, essentially. It is unclear how well it works.
Cornwall, say, had reason to feel hard done by; it was the second-poorest NUTS 3 region in Northern Europe. It's just that they were directing their ire at Europe, and not at the national government where it belonged. All but one of the ten poorest NUTS 3 regions in Northern Europe were in the UK pre-Brexit (along with the very richest NUTS 3 region, inner London), and there's a reason for that.
(Of course, the problem is now solved by Brexit; as the UK no longer participates in Eurostat, _none_ of the poorest regions in the Eurostat statistics are in the UK!)
I think this sort of things does little to convince people. The road network was there and working before the EU, it is still there and working now.
Especially, people were well aware that the UK was a consistent net contributor to the EU budget so knew that EU funding for infrastructure was not reallly a benefit.
Yes, the UK government was a net contributor, but the UK government likes to concentrate its spending around London.
EU funding was specifically given out to poorer regions (like Wales) that were long neglected by their national governments.
Devolution itself also means that, effectively, the UK government is in charge of England while the devolved governments are in charge of their respective nations, so just looking at which projects the UK government funds is misleading.
So, it is not accurate to say that regions are neglected, and you might even argue that ultimately the South East of England and England overall fund the whole country...
Overall, I do not know if that was specifically a benefit for Wales. Obviously in the end the Welsh decided that the cons outweighted the pros, anyway.
That's simply not true, the EU subsidy budget is dwarfed by each country's national budget. From https://eubudget.europarl.europa.eu/en/how-it-works/ :
The EU budget [..] accounts annually for around 1% of the EU's GNI (gross national income), or around €160-180 billion. National public spending by EU countries averages nearly 50% of their respective GNI.
I'm not sure I understand your comment tbh. Where does the money come from, if not from EU taxpayers?
> the EU subsidy budget is dwarfed by each country's national budget.
My comment had nothing to do with that.
The page you linked has a question "How is the budget funded", which lists the revenues:
> Another difference between the EU budget and national budgets is that the EU lacks direct taxation power to finance its budget and instead relies on revenues called “own resources”.
> These revenues are:
> - Custom duties on imports into the EU
> - A small part of the VAT collected by each EU country
> - A contribution based on the amount of non-recycled plastic waste in each EU country
> - National contribution from each EU country based on its gross national income (GNI). All member states contribute according to their share in the combined GNI of EU countries. This is the largest share of the own resources.
I'd say all of that comes from the EU taxpayers.
As a native US English speaker, I would probably write something like "Austria opens the world's sixth longest railway tunnel: 27 year long project arrives on schedule and under budget."
That's a long headline, though.
>> A CBC Toronto reporter rode the entire 10.3-kilometre line from east to west Monday morning, finding it took roughly 55 minutes to complete. As a reference point, over 400 runners ran this year's Toronto Marathon 10-kilometre event in under 55 minutes
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/finch-west-lrt-first-...
> "Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important."
> "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize"
There are non-English articles on the budget too.
It is important to show people that that is possible in government projects.
If you find a more concise way of saying „with unusually small overrun of it‘s budget“ tell me.
Also there were sections added after the initial estimate.
The right thing to do in this case is find the best source for this information (about the budget, schedule and completion time/cost) and make that the URL of the submission. Please email us the best links you know of about this (hn@ycombinator.com) and we'll consider updating the URL.
Always thought it seemed like a waste to not also dig out a bunch of storage while we're down there. I'm sure there are good reasons we don't
Length Tunnels Bridges Stations Cost
Koralm 130km ~50km 100 12 €6b
HS2 230km ~75km 100+ 4 €74b+
Doesn't tunnel beat any of those structures in terms of cost/complexity?
The longest road tunnel in the world only cost about 100 million in the 90s for 25km so tunneling isn't always a gigantic Big Dig style clusterfuck.
In terms of legal complexity, it's fantastically easier than picking your way across and near thousands of individual plots of very expensive land owned by people with solicitors salivating at the potential fees, expensive private infrastructure, nature reserves and so on.
Big Dig style clusterfuck is because the simplicity and cheapness you're talking about only apply to tunnels through mountains, less so to those underwater and definitely not to tunnels under big cities i.e. land that people live on, which comes with all the complexity.
Hence why tunneling does not necessarily mean a stunningly expensive project. We just hear about the HS2s and Big Digs because they reverberate for decades with all the legal battles.
The big dig is probably the last major success of American infrastructure. Referring to it as a clusterfuck is representative of why we'll never get another one.
Of course, the big dig is no excuse to not invest outside of the Boston metro area. But that's a completely different argument than saying the investment wasn't worth it.
> The investment at a reasonable price would be wroth for more because it allows similar investments elsewhere and so the total pay off would be much higher.
This is an insane way to reason about investments. No wonder this country is such a shithole. Obviously we should do similar big-dig style investments outside of Boston. Obviously investments like the big dig prompt investments nearby. But individualistic assholes like you force us all to commit suicide instead because you can't use your fucking brain to connect why investment now means we all eat good later.
The Space Shuttle was one too and that was a marvel. A deathtrap politically-motivated pork-barrel hot-mess of a project, but also a shining black-and-white marvel of a glorious flying space Aga.
https://archive.org/details/gil-scott-heron-whitey-on-the-mo...
The big dig directly benefits people producing value many, many, many times what the investment cost. Who gives a shit about the initial investment? Voters have proven time and time again that it's easier to lie to them than to get them to earnestly think.
It is one of the things that makes living here so .. infuriating at times .. but also .. rewarding.
Which also begs the question; why is a railway project page on HN at all, regardless of anything else?
That’s incredible! The project managers and contractors should collaborate on a book about how they did it. Heh staying on budget should be the norm and not the exception but irl a 20 year large infra project coming in that close is something to celebrate and learn from.
https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...
There aren't any big mountains between Graz and Klagenfurt. It's an hour on the Autobahn. That it took three hours by train... well, they just had shitty railroad? Best of luck, Southern neighbors!
I think this explains a lot. Adding a couple of stops adds a lot of time to the total!
The terrain is just hard railroad had do huge detour on this section
Look at map: https://mapy.com/en/turisticka?x=15.0703419&y=46.7076432&z=1...
Passes in those mountains are only ~1200m above valley level (~1650 abs). Yeah, perfectly ok to run railroad there.
Your autobahn climbs 600m on this section (to 1050m absolute) - it's way to high for railway to be effective.