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GENEVA - In a few years train passengers will vanish into a tunnel just south of Zurich and emerge 30 minutes later blinking in southern European sunshine. They'll have missed the Alpine views but shortened their journey to Italy by half.
With megaprojects such as this one, the new, increasingly borderless Europe is knitting itself together by busting through ancient physical barriers: a tunnel from England to France; a Scandinavian bridge that makes it possible to drive from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean shore; and soon, running 36 miles under the Alps, the world's longest rail tunnel.
Not as soon as hoped, though. The drilling is going more slowly than forecast, meaning the tunnel under the St. Gotthard massif to Milan will only open in 2015 or 2016 - five or six years late - and will cost some $2-billion more than the $10.7-billion Swiss voters were told when they approved the dig in a 1992 referendum.
A second, shorter tunnel, the 21-mile Loetschberg, is being dug to link Bern, the capital, to Milan in northern Italy. It's on course for completion in 2007 as planned, the Transport Ministry says.
But for the Swiss, proud of their reputation for efficiently handling both time and money, the delay in drilling the Gotthard is a bit of an embarrassment.
"Geological difficulties are the main cause for the rising costs and delay," said Davide Demichele, a Transport Ministry spokesman. "It is normal with tunnel projects that you cannot always tell exactly where problems lie."
The Gotthard tunnel is even tougher because it has more mountain above it than any other in the world: a 7,500-foot-high mass of rock. Engineers have had to stop repeatedly because of fault lines as well as heat and dust churned up by the mountain pressing down on drilling equipment.
Last year, for instance, engineers found an unexpected fault line near the tunnel's southern end. Steel arches were used to buttress the rock while drilling proceeded more slowly, and a planned maintenance point had to be moved to another area.
That set work back by a year. Attempts to speed the tunneling machines have failed to make up for lost time or cut costs.
"If there is a problem, then we have to solve it, but it is much more expensive when these come as surprises," Demichele said.
For the Swiss, the Gotthard and Loetschberg tunnels can't come soon enough. With the Iron Curtain gone and the European Union expanding, truck traffic across the Alps grew more than tenfold between 1980 and 1998, while rail freight rose just 37 percent, according to AlpTransit Gotthard AG, the company managing the project.
The Swiss, who aren't in the EU, have tired of traffic jams caused by big rigs and vacationers clogging their tunnels. The government has promised to halve the number of trucks on the highways, and the new rail tunnels, carrying trucks as well as passengers, look like the ideal solution.
The Gotthard will halve the present travel time between Zurich and Milan to two hours and 10 minutes. The Bern-Milan route through the Loetschberg tunnel will be shorter by an hour and take the same time as Zurich-Milan.
The low-elevation tunnels will let freight trains more than double their speeds to over 100 mph, passenger trains to over 150 mph.
A plan still on the drawing boards is the Porta Alpina underground station, which would be the world's deepest. Halfway between Zurich and Milan, an elevator would lift passengers 2,600 feet up through Alpine rock to give them a view of the beautiful Surselva Valley, and return them underground to catch a later train.
But there's no money yet. A feasibility study put the cost at $33-million to $42-million.