Keeping the world's longest railroad tunnel safe



The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland is 57km long: and I think its greatest piece of safety equipment is nowhere near the tunnel itself.

■ Thanks to Swiss Federal Railways https://www.sbb.ch/ – drone filming near the tracks was specially approved with railway staff.

■ For tours into the Gotthard Tunnel and to the visitors’ window, see Uri Tourism: https://www.uri.swiss/de/erleben/seilbahn-eldorado-uri/eisenbahn/gotthard-tunnel-erlebnis/

Camera: Alicja Pahl
Producer: Sebastian Capeda at Viven https://viven.ch
Editor: Michelle Martin https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin

I’m at https://tomscott.com
on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott
on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott
and on Instagram as tomscottgo

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44 thoughts on “Keeping the world's longest railroad tunnel safe”

  1. Tom, this is hands down one of the best and most interesting videos about the SBB I have seen…I say that as a Swiss 🙂 Very brief, yet concise and full of interesting stuff. Very well done!

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  2. Imagine minding your own business on a train going 230 km/h 2 kilometers underground with no clear sky for 25 kilometers in either direction and in the corner of your eye you see a flash of Tom Scott grinning.

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  3. they said multiple trains follow each other in the tunnel, so what happens if the train ahead of you catches fire ? we'd have to reverse at full speed to let the firefighter train go in ? i'm not even sure train conductors can just reverse without changing to the other locomotive 🤔

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  4. it's neat that computers live in a different time frame than us where we can do things like examine the dimensions of every train car, or every grain of rice or bean..things that would be insane to ask a person to do

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  5. 2:11 "That was terrifying." I want to imagine standing there with the lights of the tunnel being turned off… Completely dark… You see train lights in the far distance, maybe 6-7 kms away coming closer in about 2 minutes, you hear a roaring and literally a scary howling sound that is caused by the train pushing the air ahead at sound speed… Now THAT must be terrifying… 😰

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  6. I'm confused. 6 frieght trains and two passengers trains per hour. But he then says there's 200 Alarms a day? How? That's 8 trains an hour. I feel like he mispoke somewhere, but I can't tell where.

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