At 10:35 a.m. on July 28, tunnelers working south from Austria and north from Italy broke through the last rock separating the main running bores of the Brenner Base Tunnel, 1,400 meters beneath the Alps. The Austrian side came by drill-and-blast, the Italian by tunnel boring machine, and the 8.1-meter bores have now met.
At 55 km—64 km counting the Innsbruck bypass it joins—the Brenner will be the longest underground main-line railway in the world when it opens, now expected in early 2032. Roughly 90% of total excavation is complete. It replaces a mountain crossing that has forced freight onto trucks and up gradients since the 1860s; the flat route through the rock will let full-length normal freight trains to run between Munich and Verona.
