Ulriken Tunnel

Railway tunnel in Bergen, Norway

New Tunnel:
160 km/h (100 mph)
Old Tunnel:
130 km/h (81 mph)

The Ulriken Tunnel (Norwegian: Ulrikstunnelen) is a railway tunnel on the Bergen Line between Bergen Station and Arna Station in Bergen Municipality in Vestland county, Norway.

Original (old) tunnel

The existing 7,670-meter (25,160 ft) long tunnel runs under the northern part of the mountain Ulriken in Bergen. Before the tunnel was opened in 1964, the Bergen Line ran via Nesttun. This stretch is now a heritage railway, the Old Voss Line. The tunnel has single track and is electrified.

New tunnel

The Norwegian National Rail Administration has plans for building a second tunnel through the mountain.^[1] Work on boring the 7.7 km (4.8 mi) tunnel began in January 2016 and it is the first in Norway to use a tunnel boring machine. On August 29, 2017 infrastructure manager Bane Nor and contractors Strabag and Skanska successfully completed the boring of the new tunnel. The next step is to blow 16 crossings from the new to the old tunnel, and to make the tunnel ready for use by railway traffic. Completion of the new double-track tunnel was expected in 2020,^[2] and it opened in December of that year.^[3]

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ulriken Tunnel.

^ Aagesen, Ragnhild (21 September 2010). "Bergen-Arna" (in Norwegian). Archived from the original on 6 November 2011. Retrieved 20 September 2011.
^ Smith, Kevin. "Norway celebrates Ulriken tunnel breakthrough". Retrieved 2017-09-04.
^ "Northern Europe's busiest single-track railway tunnel gets upgrade".