Operation
The tunnel was opened for traffic in 1882, operated by the private railway company Gotthardbahn, which ran from Lucerne to Chiasso at the Italian border. The Gotthardbahn was integrated into the Swiss Federal Railways in 1909. In 1920, the first electric trains were run through the Gotthard Tunnel. Initially the voltage had to be reduced from the desired 15 kilovolts to 7.5 kV, because the grime deposited on the insulators by the steam locomotives encouraged excessive arcing. However in May the next year, steam was replaced entirely by electric traction and the problem of soot and grime was eliminated.
Until the opening of the Gotthard Road Tunnel, the Swiss Federal Railways offered piggyback services for cars and trucks through the Gotthard Tunnel. Today, that service exists as the Rolling highway from the German to the Italian border and aims to reduce truck traffic on Swiss expressways. An improvisational piggyback service from Göschenen to Airolo was offered during the two months closure of the Gotthard Road Tunnel in 2001.
Read more about this topic: Gotthard Rail Tunnel
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)