BLS and the Lötschberg: more than a century of shared history
The project
When the Gotthard Railway started its service in 1882, the Canton of Berne found itself cut off from the principal north/south transport axis. Small wonder, then, that people in the capital were soon making plans for a transit connection of their own. The Swiss Confederation, however, was uninterested in such a competitive situation and refused to provide any financial aid. Thus the Bernese people had no other option than to raise the necessary funds else-where. They struck lucky in Paris: in 1871, France had lost the border-crossing point in Basel to Germany, and leading industrialists were therefore interested in participating in an international transit railway through Switzerland, with Delle becoming the new border-crossing point between Switzerland and Italy.
A former member of the cantonal government, Wilhelm Teuscher, drew up a variety of routes via Frutigen-Lötschberg. Some cantonal ministers, however, preferred the route through the Wildstrubel. Finally, the Pro Lötschberg initiative committee got its way: on 27 July 1906, only a few months before construction started, the Bernese Alpine Railway Company Berne–Lötschberg–Simplon BLS was set up.
Construction
On 15 October 1906, work on the 58km mountain route between Frutigen and Brig was started under the leadership of a French construction consortium. The Simplon tunnel – the continuation of the Lötschberg line to Iselle in Italy – was inaugurated in the same year.
In 1907, the Confederation called upon BLS to extend the Lötschberg tunnel to accommodate twin tracks and to develop similar projects for the access ramps. The construction of the substructure for a second track along the whole line was prevented by a lack of funds, and thus it was only the tunnels that were prepared for twin-track operation. The Lötschberg tunnel alone was equipped with two tracks.
All the building materials were delivered to the north and south ramp through two smallgauge construction railways in a rather hazardous way. Part of the roadbed of the southern construction railway now serves as a path for the BLS South Ramp Walking Trail.
When on 24 July 1908, while tunnelling work was going on directly underneath the Gastern Valley, huge amounts of water and sediment rocks broke into the tunnel, and 25 Italian miners lost their lives. As a consequence of this terrible accident, construction work was interrupted for about six months. During this time, the circumvention of the part of the tunnel that had been filled with debris and then bricked up, had to be planned. Owing to the resulting three bends, the Lötschberg tunnel is now 14.612km long instead of the originally planned 13.7km. The tunnel was broken through on 31 March 1911.
Start of operations and the aftermath
After construction work on the two access ramps and its 33 tunnels, 3 avalanche galleries and 22 bridges had been concluded, the Lötschberg Railway started its operations on 15 July 1913 with an inauguration ceremony. However, international transit trains were to cross the Alps through the Lötschberg for only a short period of time since the First World War was already looming on the horizon.
In 1915, the Grenchenberg line between Moutier and Langnau was opened. Previously, the Jura mountains could only be crossed in a roundabout way, but the line through Delle to Grenchen and Biel was now finally expected to link France with the Lötschberg and Italy. When Alsace and Lorraine were restituted to France in 1919, however, transit traffic soon crossed the border at Basel/St-Louis again, and the border-crossing point of Delle lost its significance. BLS was able to compensate for this loss in transit traffic through the increasing exchange of goods between Germany and Italy, and national traffic to and from the Valais also registered unexpected growth. Soon no one doubted the political and economic value of the new transalpine rail link.
The great extensions
In 1976, the Swiss government approved a construction credit of 620 million francs to add a second track to the line in several stages. Construction work was started a year later, and on 8 May 1992, the all-twin-track Lötschberg line was inaugurated.
In late 1993, the Confederation instructed BLS to prepare a piggyback corridor for lorries until the base tunnel was available. Construction work began in January 1994; however, the start of operations was delayed because of geological problems on the south side of the Simplon. The rolling motorway became operational on 11 June 2001 and has made a substantial contribution towards the move of transit traffic from road to rail ever since.
Innovative traction vehicles
In 1913, the line was opened with the world's strongest electric locomotive: at a one-hour rating of 2500 hp, the Be 5/7 type pulled up to 310 tons across the mountain route. Reinforcement from Italy arrived in 1926: the Be 6/8 pulled no less than 550 tons up the ramps with a gradient of 2.7 per cent. Yet this was not enough for BLS. In conjunction with the industry, it developed the Ae 4/4. This first electric engine without any unpowered axles was, as it were, the mother of all modern locomotives.
This was followed by the development of heavy double locomotives (Ae 8/8) and faster, stronger and more modern versions (Re 425). The absolute highlight to date is the RE 465 which, when it went into service in 1994, was regarded as the world's strongest off-the-shelf four-axle locomotive.
Further information:
» History
Wilhelm Teuscher (1834-1903)
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Wilhelm Teuscher (1834 -1903), the spiritual father of the Lötschberg line |
15 October 1906: Construction starts
15.07.1913: Lötschberg becomes operational
Ae 4/4
