Great St Bernard Tunnel - Description

Description

There is a toll to use the tunnel, payable in full even for drivers who already display on their vehicles a Swiss motorway sticker. The tunnel comprises a section of the E27 route linking Belfort with Aosta.

For most of its 5,798 metres length the tunnel runs in a straight line, but incorporating a gentle slope. The northern end is 1,918 m (6,293 ft) above sea level while the southern end is only 1,875 m (6,152 ft) above sea level. At both ends, the approach road to the tunnel is covered by a gallery / avalanche shelter in order to minimize the risk of access to the tunnel being temporarily blocked during bad weather. Any frontier formalities are handled at the tunnel's north end, although the actual national frontier is 2,938 m (9,639 ft) from the Swiss tunnel entrance and 2,860 m (9,380 ft) from the Italian entrance.

The name of the tunnel comes directly from that of the Grand St Bernard Pass, and thereby indirectly from the saint who in 1049 founded the hospice high above the tunnel, that also bears his name. Tourists on the Swiss side additionally find themselves reminded by road side billboards of the saint's association with St Bernard dogs.

Read more about this topic:  Great St Bernard Tunnel

Famous quotes containing the word description:

    I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    God damnit, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they’d hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows.
    Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)

    To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)