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The Simplon Tunnel opens – archive, February 1905

The Simplon pierced: completion of the great tunnel

25 February 1905

The Simplon Tunnel was completed at 7’20 yesterday morning, and “through the rocks of the Alps Switzerland and Italy join hands.” The words are from a telegram of congratulation sent by the municipality of Lausanne, to the Syndic of Milan – a telegram which voices the joy of the Swiss nation at an event so long and so impatiently awaited.

M Ruchet, President of the Swiss Confederation, in a telegram of congratulation to King Victor Emmanuel and Signor Giolitti, the Italian Premier, likewise expresses the wish that the great work will contribute to draw still closer the bonds of friendship uniting the two countries, which have both contributed to the expense of the undertaking. The contractors have telegraphed the news of the meeting of the two galleries to the King of Italy and the Swiss President, and the Italian and Swiss flags float over the entrance to the tunnel. The town of Iselle (on the Italian side) is en fête.

The actual opening ceremony will take place about March 28. Meanwhile the water which has accumulated in places has to be drawn off and the permanent way built. But the piercing of the tunnel means a triumph over all difficulties and the completion of an engineering work the result of which is the longest tunnel in the world.

The story of the work
Oliver Wendell Holmes’s metaphor that the last drop of water in a bottle was the hardest to pour out might be held to apply with peculiar fitness to the completion of the Simplon Tunnel. Of the tunnel, which is more than twelve miles long and the piercing of which began six years ago, only 200 yards remained to be drilled last October, only sixty yards at the beginning of the third week in February, and only five yards on Thursday. But the last sixty yards of the work were accompanied with the gravest difficulties and were attended by a problem of great uncertainty.

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Related: World's longest rail tunnel to open in Switzerland under Alps

The Simplon Tunnel opened

26 January 1906

Ordinary passenger service through the Simplon Tunnel was started yesterday, the first train entering the tunnel at 8 56 am from the north and leaving it at 9 53 am. The best of conditions prevailed as far as temperature and other matters were concerned. On the train emerging from the tunnel cheers were raised by the spectators and salutes were fired. The train consisted of an engine and four passenger coaches, containing a number of eminent passengers and journalists.

Editorial: under or over the Alps

20 August 1910

A new kind of travel is suggested by the Geneva correspondent of a London newspaper. There is talk of linking up the Simplon and St Gotthard railways, on the Italian side of the Alps, by making a new line along the north-west shore of Lake Maggiore, from Locarno, on a branch of the St. Gotthard line, to Fondo-Toce on the Simplon. It is a very good plan, and will save tourists a good deal of time in many little expeditions near Lake Maggiore, and enable more good Meredithians with Vittoria in their pockets to go to Montterone for the famous view of the “burnished realm of mountain and plain beneath the royal sun of Italy.” But this Geneva correspondent goes further, and says that “a circular tour around Switzerland by the Simplon and St Gotthard lines could be conveniently undertaken.”
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Editorial: tunnels for peace

19 May 1956

Half a century ago to-day the great Simplon Tunnel, Milan’s way beneath the Alps to Lausanne, Paris, Calais, London, was inaugurated for railway travel. On the anniversary the Italian and Swiss Presidents are engaged in toasting each other’s Republics and inaugurating commemorative exhibitions. According to the first edition (1914) of the Italian Touring Club’s admirable series of guides: “The conception and direction of this great work were foreign, but the exceedingly arduous execution was the glory of Italian workmen.” So the exhibitions on the Italian side at Milan and Domodossola are being matched by a Swiss exhibition at Lausanne.

The Simplon rail route opened up for traffic thirty-five years later than the Mont Cenis or Frejus route, linking Turin to Chambery and Paris and providing still the classic British way to Rome. The Simplon Tunnel seas nearly twice as long as the other, and very deep and difficult; but improved techniques allowed it to be built in about half the time. (The St Gothard Tunnel through Switzerland to Germany was an intermediate achievement in each respect while the Brenner railroad, well away from the Italian frontiers of those times, could be carried over the Alps by sheer climbing.) In their turn these victories over Europe’s major mountains relegated Hannibal’s, and even Napoleon’s, methods of getting in or out of Italy to the history books. That would not have been true for war-time, had not Italy steadily enjoyed the conviction that Switzerland would and could defend its own neutrality. Even so, in the Mussolinian tyranny and the Second World War the old pilgrims’ routes reacquired importance as paths of escape. No railborn comfort for those tormented men seeking freedom! Mass-motoring has now opened a new phase in trans-alpine travel, with the railways called upon to give a lift to ever-swelling numbers of motor-cars far beneath the impassable winter roads. Meanwhile the anniversary celebration reminds us – and is this not salutary? – how confidently our grandfathers then saved and planned and worked to produce common sense improvements in human comfort and commerce.

Editorial: under the mountain

15 August 1962

The first thing that happened yesterday after the French and Italian engineers had met and toasted each other under Mont Blanc was that the two governments opened a Customs and frontier post at the Italian end of the tunnel. But this seems to be a gesture aimed at complying with all the bureaucratic forms rather than an earnest of interference to come. Customs and immigration checks between members of the European Economic Community are already slight compared with the kind of thing you find at Dover. There seems no reason to doubt that when the tunnel opens to traffic some eighteen months hence it will do a great deal to let cars and lorries travel between the two countries freely and in all weathers.

Related: No longer an island: when the Channel Tunnel opened – May 1994

The tunnel will not only cut 124 miles off the road journey from Paris to Rome, it will make the journey possible during the months when the Alpine passes are snowed up and motorists must now take the circuitous and crowded road along the Mediterranean coast. It is remarkable how recently the Alps made a near-impassable barrier in winter – almost within living memory. Less than ninety years ago the poet Rimbaud had to take refuge in one of the famous mountain hospices whose fame survives in countless jokes about St Bernard dogs rescuing travellers in the snow. The St Gotthard railway tunnel was then being built. If we have any sense it ought not to be long before a Channel tunnel makes the present arrangements at Dover look as antediluvian as the hospices on the Alpine passes.