Work on the Gotthard rail tunnel began in 1872 under the Swiss engineer Louis Favre. Crews drilled towards each other from Göschenen in the north and Airolo in the south. On 29 February 1880 the Gotthard Railway Company staged the official breakthrough in front of journalists, engineers and officials. The two headings met with remarkable precision for the surveying methods of the day. When the 15-kilometre tunnel opened in 1882, it tied northern Europe to Italy by rail through the heart of the Alps.
The Gotthard was a brutal job. Workers used dynamite and compressed-air drills in hot, dusty, badly ventilated galleries, and many of them died building it. Louis Favre, the engineer who had won the contract, never saw his headings meet. He collapsed and died inside the tunnel in 1879, a few months before the breakthrough.
The breakthrough itself was partly theatre. The drill had actually broken through the last dividing wall the day before. The railway company waited until the next day, Sunday 29 February 1880, to hold the official ceremony with dignitaries and the press. Beneath thousands of metres of rock, the survey lines from the two portals lined up almost perfectly.
The tunnel opened to traffic in 1882 as the longest railway tunnel in the world, at about 15 kilometres. It turned the Gotthard, a mountain pass since the Middle Ages, into one of Europe's main transport corridors. More than a century later, Switzerland drove the even longer Gotthard Base Tunnel deep under the same mountains.
Key people: Louis Favre