There was light at the Italian end of the world's longest railroad tunnel. An excavator recently broke through a wall separating two sections of the $9.6-billion Brenner Base Tunnel, creating a 24.1-km continuous bore from the south portal at Fortezza to the Austrian border at Brenner.
Since the machine driving the exploratory tunnel reached the border at Brenner in November, there is now a continuous bore in Italy. Both main Italian drives are due for completion by this year's end. Partly because of a contractual dispute, work in Austria is less advanced.