looking north from the gotthardtunnel

each tunnel's portals will be custom made when necessary.
thus the northern portal of the gotthard tunnel itself has two tubes at the entrance which join and become one after a very short distance.

if so inclined, you can watch a cab ride video of the journey through the whole 15 km long tunnel on alpentunnel.de.
the video called "Führerstandsfahrt Amsteg - Airolo" of course not only covers the ride through the tunnel, but also the climb up from erstfeld to göschenen.
here is a direct link if you do not speak german, be careful its 362 mb.

göschenen

the trackwork north of the tunnel is finished!

's chileli vo wasse

wassen is the smallest station yet, but probably one of the most peculiar ones. sitting in between two tunnel loops, the trains go past the station three times on different heights and gain around 150 metres without even leaving the village.

the loops brought extraordinary fame to the small church of wassen, which can be seen three times from different perspectives while the train wriggles itself around the village.

1 106 metres above the sea

after the track builders lost their sense of direction shortly in great fog, they reached göschenen at 1 106 metres above sea level.

wanderer im nebelmoor

exhaust effects

track in gurtnellen is done

after i have rebuild the complete section between amsteg and gurtnellen twice due to slight height inaccuracies, i could finally put the track down in gurtnellen itself.

track reaches gurtnellen

and do you know what is being manufactured in the tiny remote village of gurtnellen?
this is...

no really, some parts of the rocket engines are being made there by the small company schmelzmetall ag.

as you'd expect from rocket scientists, they are based in an old and abandoned looking building and can't even be reached by truck. so the rocket engines (well, parts of them) leave gurtnellen on the gotthard railway!

the 26 o/oo climb to gurtnellen is under way

but over two hours were spent for just 4 kilometers of plain track, even though i'm following the real line with the help of aerial images!

track laid out in erstfeld

with the traverser figured out i could finish the trackwork at erstfeld. at least thats what i thought until i found out the hard way that traversers can, as of yet, only have 6 parallel tracks connected to them.
the erstfeld traverser however allows access to 12 tracks which, to make it even more complicated, are oddly spaced so i would need a traverser with around 23 connection points to realistically recreate the depot.

i decided to built it anyway and have the traverser only connect to 6 of the tracks and put the others in the right place to connect them if it ever becomes possible.


erstfeld depot is fairly important since its here that the steep climb up the north ramp begins, for which additional engines are put in front or behind the heavier freight trains.
therefor a lot of staff and engines are based here, even some foreign ones.

the steep track from here on is probably one of the few places in europe where you can observe up to 4 working engines in front of a train.
in this case the two re 6/6 and two re 4/4 develop 34.000 horsepower together, thats as much as around seven huge american dash 9 diesel engines.
although they can't use all their power in this configuration or otherwise they would just rip apart the couplers. therefore even today trains have to be split up in erstfeld or get help from an engine pushing from behind.

bruno lämmli who created the website lokifahrer.ch is a driver who was based in erstfeld a long time and has written a lot about his experiences driving over the gotthard. be sure to check his site out if you can read german.

erstfeld is also home to many historic engines like the ae 6/6 prototype "uri" with the number 11402, named after the kanton which is home to the north ramp.
the first prototype with the engine number 11401 was called "ticino" after the kanton in which the south ramp of the gotthard railway is located.