Koralm Railway
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The Koralm Railway's impending completion has sparked a lively discussion, with commenters eagerly anticipating the new tunnel's opening, currently slated for December 2025. Some users poked fun at Wikipedia's premature update, joking that the site was "living in the future past." As commenters reminisced about their childhood excitement over the project, a debate emerged about whether the railway's significance was more spectacle than utility, with some arguing that even impractical aspects can captivate a child's imagination. The thread's enthusiasm and nostalgia make it a compelling read, particularly for those interested in infrastructure and regional development.
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Dec 12, 2025 at 5:50 AM EST
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel
https://www.der-postillon.com/2012/08/neue-zeitform-futur-ii...
The third attempt at a Dublin metro just got planning permission a few weeks ago; said planning is now bogged down in a judicial review.
Somewhat envious of Austria’s speed in this sort of thing, really…
> "Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important." > "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize"
There are non-English articles on the budget too.
https://orf.at/stories/3414173/
If everyone just added whatever additional information they felt like to the titles, it would suck.
It's better to title it properly, then comment on it with whatever cool details you want to highlight.
The right thing to do in this case is find the best source for this information (about the budget, schedule and completion time/cost) and make that the URL of the submission. Please email us the best links you know of about this (hn@ycombinator.com) and we'll consider updating the URL.
Always thought it seemed like a waste to not also dig out a bunch of storage while we're down there. I'm sure there are good reasons we don't
Doesn't tunnel beat any of those structures in terms of cost/complexity?
The longest road tunnel in the world only cost about 100 million in the 90s for 25km so tunneling isn't always a gigantic Big Dig style clusterfuck.
Big Dig style clusterfuck is because the simplicity and cheapness you're talking about only apply to tunnels through mountains, less so to those underwater and definitely not to tunnels under big cities i.e. land that people live on, which comes with all the complexity.
Hence why tunneling does not necessarily mean a stunningly expensive project. We just hear about the HS2s and Big Digs because they reverberate for decades with all the legal battles.
The big dig is probably the last major success of American infrastructure. Referring to it as a clusterfuck is representative of why we'll never get another one.
The Space Shuttle was one too and that was a marvel. A deathtrap politically-motivated pork-barrel hot-mess of a project, but also a shining black-and-white marvel of a glorious flying space Aga.
https://archive.org/details/gil-scott-heron-whitey-on-the-mo...
It is one of the things that makes living here so .. infuriating at times .. but also .. rewarding.
Which also begs the question; why is a railway project page on HN at all, regardless of anything else?
That’s incredible! The project managers and contractors should collaborate on a book about how they did it. Heh staying on budget should be the norm and not the exception but irl a 20 year large infra project coming in that close is something to celebrate and learn from.
https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...
How is there no unifying design language for these?
Also, the EU is the most efficient government in terms of overhead, and having seen some of it up close not wasting time or money on "unifying design languages" for every single funding billboard is very much EU style. Just copy-paste by some local authority in Powerpoint in most cases, I bet.
Also, eyesore? What do you have against the EU flag?
Now I am sure that Austria has benefited from EU membership, but this is not one of the areas.
The funds are less useful if they're in the hands of our government.
Basically yoy bid to get some of your money back...
Which is much better than at the Austrian politics level.
I like the EU flag. I do not like the billboards. They just do not look good. Plant an actual flag there instead? I'd prefer that!
I think this sort of things does little to convince people. The road network was there and working before the EU, it is still there and working now.
Especially, people were well aware that the UK was a consistent net contributor to the EU budget so knew that EU funding for infrastructure was not reallly a benefit.
Yes, the UK government was a net contributor, but the UK government likes to concentrate its spending around London.
EU funding was specifically given out to poorer regions (like Wales) that were long neglected by their national governments.
Devolution itself also means that, effectively, the UK government is in charge of England while the devolved governments are in charge of their respective nations, so just looking what projects the UK government funds is misleading.
So, it is not accurate to say that regions are neglected, and you might even argue that ultimately the South East of England funds the whole country...
Overall, I do not know if that was specifically a benefit for Wales. Obviously in the end the Welsh decided that the cons outweighted the pros.
That's simply not true, the EU subsidy budget is dwarfed by each country's national budget. From [0]:
The EU budget [..] accounts annually for around 1% of the EU's GNI (gross national income), or around €160-180 billion. National public spending by EU countries averages nearly 50% of their respective GNI.
[0] https://eubudget.europarl.europa.eu/en/how-it-works/
I'm not sure I understand your comment tbh. Where does the money come from, if not from EU taxpayers?
> the EU subsidy budget is dwarfed by each country's national budget.
My comment had nothing to do with that.
The page you linked has a question "How is the budget funded", which lists the revenues:
> Another difference between the EU budget and national budgets is that the EU lacks direct taxation power to finance its budget and instead relies on revenues called “own resources”.
> These revenues are:
> - Custom duties on imports into the EU
> - A small part of the VAT collected by each EU country
> - A contribution based on the amount of non-recycled plastic waste in each EU country
> - National contribution from each EU country based on its gross national income (GNI). All member states contribute according to their share in the combined GNI of EU countries. This is the largest share of the own resources.
I'd say all of that comes from the EU taxpayers.
1: https://hadea.ec.europa.eu/programmes/connecting-europe-faci...
2: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/3192a0ef-6bda...
3: https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/information-sources/log...
https://image-service.web.oebb.at/infra/.imaging/default/dam...
https://image-service.web.oebb.at/infra/.imaging/default/dam...
... it looks like a multi-multi-multi-phase project. Hats off to making this work.
Second, I noticed how long it took to build this tunnel: Koralm Tunnel -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel
It is 33km, and it took from 2008 to 2025 to build it. That is a damn long time! The Toei Oedo line in Tokyo is 40+km and was built in about 10 years. My guess about the wild difference: The geoengineering of the Koralm Tunnel is way more complex, and/or the rock is much harder. Can anyone with experience in this area comment? I would like to learn more. I guess that most of central Tokyo is aluvial plains (Shanghai is similar), so you are basically digging through clay and sand -- easy stuff for modern tunnel boring machines.
Population size, density, terrain, etc. have nothing to do with it.
Kanto is basically flat, it's the only region in Japan that could sustain such a massive population.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Topograp...
Being two separate tunnels, it also needs twice as much excavation work. It's also ~25x deeper than Toei Oedo (4000ft vs 157ft). At 4000ft the rock itself is 45-50C!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088677982...
Assumed they would at least have their own air in the bits that didn't have aircon/ventilation while it was being built. They don't even need to do that anymore! The ventilation systems they used are as advanced and bespoke as the boring machines.
Because they were blasting too, they couldn't utilize full-face pressurization of the entire tunnel to maintain negative pressure to suck all of the fumes, dust, silicates, etc out like they would if it was only boring. That's 1-3kPa, "leaks are jets of air, can pull an airlock door closed hard enough to break bones" territory.
Instead, they have a bunch of dedicated supply and exhaust vents going to the surface (some up to 2m in diameter) and sets of connections between the two tunnels with huge axial fans. It allows them to selectively apply "slight" negative pressure to any of the individual segments when they need to clear them. 50Pa is ~10x what you encounter in a negative pressure highrise. It is described as a "constant slight breeze"
I found this short video on some of the safety features of the finished tunnel. It almost looks "too serious", like something out of a James Bond movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8trt96huf0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurobe_Seny%C5%8D_Railway
Overall an amazing achievement, and unsurprising it took this long to figure out!
The Alps are very, very old in comparison.
1998: Start of construction of the Koralm Railway
2008: Start of construction of the Koralm Tunnel
2018: Breakthrough Koralm Tunnel
2020: Final Koralm tunnel breakthrough
2025: This announcement (https://orf.at/stories/3414173/ in German)
https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...
Seems like a great project outcome. Mostly within budget, no political chaos due to delays (AFAICT) and allowing several months for testing before announcing it open.
There aren't any big mountains between Graz and Klagenfurt. It's an hour on the Autobahn. That it took three hours by train... well, they just had shitty railroad? Best of luck, Southern neighbors!
I think this explains a lot. Adding a couple of stops adds a lot of time to the total!
The terrain is just hard railroad had do huge detour on this section
Look at map: https://mapy.com/en/turisticka?x=15.0703419&y=46.7076432&z=1...
Passes in those mountains are only ~1200m above valley level (~1650 abs). Yeah, perfectly ok to run railroad there.
Your autobahn climbs 600m on this section (to 1050m absolute) - it's way to high for railway to be effective.
https://youtu.be/NFrr-L_BcC4?si=vhTuzwsPPPxa1Xio
https://nomoretax.eu/italy-a-new-tax-haven/
I'd be a bit nervous, going through a long tunnel, in a region known for vulcanism and earthquakes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel
A tunnel is actually the least likely to shake; if you shake a jello with fruit inside it, the surface moves a lot but the interior fruit won’t move all that much.
You don't hear that much about great engineering projects today, yet it's still an incredible feat to build those.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Base_Tunnel
Here's a great engineering project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_test_tunnel
That's really odd.
My high school physics is not sufficient to really understand it.
As a native US English speaker, I would probably write something like "Austria opens the world's sixth longest railway tunnel: 27 year long project arrives on schedule and under budget."
That's a long headline, though.
>> A CBC Toronto reporter rode the entire 10.3-kilometre line from east to west Monday morning, finding it took roughly 55 minutes to complete. As a reference point, over 400 runners ran this year's Toronto Marathon 10-kilometre event in under 55 minutes
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/finch-west-lrt-first-...
The only options to get around was the expensive train system - and anyone I asked was bewildered why I would want to take a bus.. Maybe next time I should look in to carpooling or some other options. How do low income people get around typically? I need to go to attend a conference, but it's not cheap coming from Asia
Thank you for the info!
Not always true. The Graz-Vienna(Airport) trip is often quicker by flixbus than by OBB train.
Trains in Austria are quite slow , often travelling at the same speed as cars on the highway or often times even slower.
https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000299789/traum-vom-sue...
https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...
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