Alps rail tunnel hits 50km excavation mark

Workers boring through the French-Italian Alps have now excavated 50 kilometres of underground galleries for the Turin-Lyon base tunnel, pushing through some of the hardest rock on the continent to carve out one of the longest rail crossings ever attempted, with twin tubes of 57.5 km each (FS Italiane). The number sounds like the tunnel is nearly done. It is not. Much of those 50 km covers access shafts, safety passages and preparatory works, and the main bore is less than half complete. Europe can dig through this mountain. Running trains through it is a different project, and its economic case depends on what comes after.

Why flat tunnels matter for freight

Mountains force railways to climb, curve and descend, limiting train weight, speed and schedule reliability. A base tunnel, cut low and flat through the rock, removes those penalties. Longer, heavier freight trains cross the Alps with fewer locomotives.

Turin-Lyon sits on the Mediterranean Corridor, one of nine routes in TEN-T (the Trans-European Transport Network, the EU's plan to connect national rail systems into a continental grid) (European Commission). TELT, the Franco-Italian body running the works, says the finished line could remove over 1 million lorries from Alpine roads each year and cut CO₂ emissions by 1 million tonnes annually (FS Italiane). Today, just two direct Lyon-Turin trains run daily, averaging about 4 hours 25 minutes (SNCF Connect). The promise is a big improvement. But infrastructure alone has never moved freight off roads.

Austria built tunnels. Trucks kept coming.

About 500 km east, the Brenner corridor shows why. Around 2.42 million heavy lorries crossed the Brenner pass in 2025, even as rail's share of freight on the same corridor fell from 36% in 2010 to 25% in 2023 (MeinBezirk). More tunnels and more policy effort did not shift goods onto trains. In the first half of 2026, truck traffic rose another 3.6% (VerkehrsRundschau).

Switzerland explains the difference. The Swiss pair their tunnels with the LSVA, a distance-based charge on heavy vehicles that makes road haulage genuinely more expensive (Bundesamt für Verkehr). Around 858,000 lorries crossed all four Swiss Alpine passes in 2025, roughly a third of the Brenner's volume (MeinBezirk). Infrastructure creates capacity. Pricing decides whether anyone uses it.

That is the mechanism Turin-Lyon needs. Without road charges that reflect the real cost of wear, pollution and congestion, many shippers will still pick trucks, because road haulage is often faster, more flexible and delivers door-to-door.

The tunnel is not the corridor

The cross-border section is budgeted at around €11 billion, split roughly 50% EU, 30% Italy, 20% France (TrasportoEuropa). But the tunnel alone does not make a working route. French access lines connecting it to Lyon may not arrive before 2045, even if the bore opens around 2033–2035 (Le Progrès). The European Court of Auditors has warned that cross-border rail megaprojects lose their benefits exactly this way: connecting sections arrive late, and governments do not finish their pieces (European Court of Auditors).

The full corridor cost is unclear. Auditors estimated €26 billion or more back in 2012, and no updated total has appeared since (European Court of Auditors).

Who gains, who pays

The tunnel addresses a real physical constraint. Large-scale rail freight across this part of the Alps cannot work without it. Potential winners include rail freight operators, Mediterranean ports, manufacturers along the corridor and passengers who would gain much shorter travel times. Taxpayers in France, Italy and across the EU bear the cost.

But every lorry-removal and CO₂ figure attached to this project is a forecast. Those forecasts require access lines, terminals, reserved freight-train slots, and road charges that make rail the rational choice. Fifty kilometres of underground galleries is a serious engineering achievement. Turning a hole in the mountain into a transport system that freight operators choose over trucks is the harder project, and it has barely started.