Alpine tunnel reaches 50km milestone

Workers under the French-Italian Alps have now dug 50 kilometres of underground galleries for the Turin-Lyon base tunnel, forcing their way through some of Europe's toughest rock for a rail project that will eventually have two 57.5 km tubes (FS Italiane). That figure sounds as if the tunnel is close to completion. It is not. A large part of the 50 km consists of access shafts, safety galleries and preparatory works, while the main tunnel is still less than half finished. Europe can dig the mountain. Making the railway work commercially is the harder test.

Why flat tunnels matter for freight

Alpine railways have a simple problem: gradients. Trains climbing and descending through mountain routes carry less, move more slowly and run with less reliability. A base tunnel cuts low and flat through the rock, allowing longer and heavier freight trains to cross with fewer locomotives.

Turin-Lyon forms part of the Mediterranean Corridor, one of the nine routes in TEN-T, the EU's Trans-European Transport Network that is meant to stitch national rail systems into a single continental grid (European Commission). For Malta, this may sound distant, but the same EU logic is familiar: Brussels funds the infrastructure, member states complete their links, and the benefit only appears if the whole chain works.

TELT, the Franco-Italian body managing the project, says the completed line could remove more than 1 million lorries from Alpine roads each year and cut CO₂ emissions by 1 million tonnes annually (FS Italiane). Today, there are only two direct Lyon-Turin trains a day, taking around 4 hours 25 minutes (SNCF Connect). The improvement promised is real. But infrastructure by itself has rarely persuaded freight operators to leave the road.

Austria built tunnels. Trucks kept coming.

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

Switzerland took a different route. Its tunnels are paired with the LSVA, a distance-based charge on heavy vehicles that makes road haulage pay more of its real cost (Bundesamt für Verkehr). Around 858,000 lorries crossed all four Swiss Alpine passes in 2025, roughly a third of the Brenner volume (MeinBezirk). The lesson is blunt enough: tunnels create capacity; pricing decides whether the market uses it.

That is the mechanism Turin-Lyon still needs. If road charges do not reflect wear, pollution and congestion, many shippers will keep choosing trucks. Road haulage is often faster, more flexible and door-to-door, which is why the economic argument for rail depends on more than concrete and boring machines.

The tunnel is not the corridor

The cross-border section is budgeted at around €11 billion, with the EU expected to cover roughly 50%, Italy 30% and France 20% (TrasportoEuropa). But a tunnel alone does not create a functioning corridor. French access lines connecting it to Lyon may not be ready before 2045, even if the tunnel itself opens around 2033-2035 (Le Progrès). The European Court of Auditors has warned repeatedly that cross-border rail megaprojects lose their value in exactly this way: one section advances, the connecting pieces lag, and national governments leave the European promise half-built (European Court of Auditors).

The full corridor cost is still unclear. Auditors put it at €26 billion or more in 2012, and no updated total has since been produced (European Court of Auditors).

Who gains, who pays

The tunnel answers a real physical constraint. Serious rail freight across this part of the Alps cannot work properly without it. The likely winners are rail freight operators, Mediterranean ports, manufacturers along the corridor and passengers who would get much shorter journey times. The bill falls on taxpayers in France, Italy and across the EU.

But every claim about lorries removed and CO₂ saved is still a forecast. Those forecasts require access lines, terminals, freight-train slots and road pricing that makes rail the sensible choice. Fifty kilometres of underground galleries is a major engineering achievement. Turning that excavation into a transport system that hauliers actually choose over trucks is the bigger political and economic project, and it is only just beginning.