Brenner Tunnel Faces German Delay

Under the Alps, the railway has finally broken through. On 25 August, a boring machine finished the last stretch of the first continuous tube of the Brenner Base Tunnel, creating a 55km underground route from Innsbruck in Austria to Fortezza in Italy (South Tyrol, ANSA). When trains begin running, around 2032, it will be the world’s longest underground railway link. The bill is €10.5 billion, with the EU putting in €2.3 billion (CINEA). The harder test now is whether Europe can build the freight corridor around it in time.

A flat track under a steep pass

The old Brenner railway is a fine piece of 19th-century engineering, but a poor fit for modern freight. It climbs gradients of 24–27 per mille, steep enough that goods trains need extra locomotives and cannot carry as much weight (BBT SE). The new tunnel runs almost flat, at 4–7 per mille. That means longer, heavier trains, with Innsbruck-to-Fortezza cut from 80 minutes to about 25 (CINEA, Webuild). In freight, gradient is money: a flatter line makes rail faster and cheaper per tonne.

The market is sitting above the tunnel already. More than 2.5 million trucks cross the Brenner Pass every year, while rail carries only about 27% of cross-border freight on the corridor (CINEA, Bezirksjournal). Three quarters of the goods still move by road. A tunnel that makes rail quicker and cheaper has obvious demand, provided the lines feeding into it can cope.

That is where the story becomes less tidy. Germany’s northern access route from Munich through Bavaria has not begun construction. Berlin’s transport ministry sent planning documents to the Bundestag in July 2026, leaving parliament to decide whether to proceed (BMV). Bavarian reporting puts construction starting in 2034 and trains running in 2043 (rosenheim24, BR24). If the tunnel opens in 2032, Europe’s most expensive Alpine crossing could spend eight to 11 years below full capacity because the Bavarian tracks are not ready. Germany’s access route alone is estimated at about €16.2 billion (n-tv, Spiegel).

Italy is further along on the southern side. RFI, the Italian rail network manager, has begun work on the first Fortezza–Ponte Gardena lot, worth more than €1.5 billion (RFI). But the wider Fortezza–Verona upgrade is not finished, and the Rovereto bypass remains at design stage (Daily Alpine). Rome has started the job. It has not yet delivered the corridor.

Switzerland already tried this

There is a useful warning next door. Switzerland opened the Gotthard and Ceneri base tunnels, then backed them with strong policy incentives to move freight from road to rail. By the end of 2024, rail’s share of Swiss transalpine freight was about 70%. That is a serious achievement, but it had slipped 2.6 percentage points since 2022. Some 960,000 trucks still crossed the Swiss Alps, well above the legal target of 650,000 (admin.ch, SRF). Swiss authorities point to construction works on access routes and too little diversion capacity. Even a flat tunnel, matched with a government determined to favour rail, cannot do the job if the connecting lines fall short.

Who gains, who waits

The clearest winners would be northern Italian exporters and logistics firms, which stand to get faster and more reliable rail links into Germany. The Italy–Germany lane alone carries more than 220,000 full truckloads a year (Contship Italia). Tyrolean communities living with lorry pollution gain only if policy pushes traffic off the road once rail capacity exists. Long-haul hauliers whose margins depend on cheap Alpine transit, and taxpayers exposed to overruns on both sides of the border, carry much of the adjustment cost.

The EU is caught in the middle of its own policy. Brussels co-funded the tunnel to shift freight to rail. Yet in case C-524/24, the Commission intervened on Italy’s side against Austria’s truck restrictions on the same corridor (Curia, Trasporto Europa). Austria wants to curb trucks now. The Commission argues that such restrictions obstruct EU trade while rail capacity is not ready. In July 2026, an Advocate General recommended that Austria’s bans breach EU free-movement law (Logifie). Europe is building the rail alternative while protecting the road system until that alternative works. The contradiction disappears only if the whole corridor is completed.

The tunnel cannot move the freight on its own. The question is whether five countries can turn two decades of access-route construction into one functioning railway corridor. That will decide whether €10.5 billion buys Europe a real shift from road to rail, or leaves a remarkable piece of engineering waiting for the rest of the railway to catch up.