Bridging Europe’s North-South Divide With the Fehmarnbelt project, Europe is looking to bridge the divide between Scandinavia and Germany. Robert Williams reports.
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hen the Berlin Wall fell, Europe started rebuilding its lost and moribund east-west transport networks. But old north-south bottlenecks are back in the spotlight. Of the nine ‘Core Network Corridors’ currently earmarked for EU investment, six are more vertical than horizontal. The highlight of this strategy is the ‘Scandinavian-Mediterranean corridor’ stretching from Sweden and Finland, through Denmark, Germany, Austria and Italy to Malta in the south. However, in many ways, Europe’s northsouth divide is more complicated. There are challenging physical barriers, like the Alps and the cold Baltic Sea, as well as deep cultural and economic differences. The greatest progress in developing this North-South link has been at the route’s northern end. The Oresund link, a 16km road-and-rail, bridge-and-tunnel link from Malmo to Copenhagen, which opened in 2000, has knitted the two cities into one region. The next step is to link them to Hamburg with a tunnel bearing two train tracks and a four-lane highway under the Fehmarn Strait (‘Fehmarnbelt’ in German). The Fehmarn Strait in the Baltic Sea is 18km (11 miles) wide and will create a new direct link by railway and road between northern Ger6 Industry Europe
many and Lolland, and to the Danish island of Zealand and Copenhagen. This route is known in German as the Vogelfluglinie and in Danish as Fugleflugtslinjen (literally ‘the bird flight line’ or ‘as the crow flies’ in English). As early as 2000, German and Danish transportation planners pushed for a ‘fixed link’ – either a bridge or a tunnel – across the Fehmarn Strait. A bridge was for years regarded the most likely scheme, but in late 2010 the Danish project planners decided that an immersed tunnel would present fewer construction risks and cost about the same. So the Fehmarn Belt will be crossed by an immersed tunnel, at 17.6km (10.9 miles), the longest ever constructed, and will supersede the 13.5km (8.4-mile) Marmaray Tunnel of the Bosphorus, in Turkey.
Multimodal transport link The Fehmarnbelt project will soon to be the biggest construction site on the continent, and will help create a new regional economy. This programme, jointly funded by the EU and member states, includes railway electrification, port modernisation and the two largest engineering projects in Europe. While it currently takes four and a half hours to travel by train from Hamburg to Copenhagen, and ten hours by train between Stock-
holm and Hamburg, frequent passenger and freight trains will cut down the journey time to just two hours. The Fehmarnbelt link will be built as an immersed tunnel between Rødbyhavn on Lolland and the German island of Fehmarn. This immersed tunnel is made up of hollow concrete elements, cast on land and assembled section by section to form the tunnel. Underwater tunnels are either bored or immersed: tunnel boring is common for deepwater tunnels longer than 4 or 5 kilometres (3.1 mi), while immersion is commonly used for tunnels which cross relatively shallow waters. Immersion involves dredging a trench across the seafloor, laying a foundation bed of sand or gravel, then lowering precast concrete tunnel sections into the excavation and covering it with a protective layer of backfill several metres thick. A trench for the tunnel will first be dug in the seabed. This trench will be up to 60 metres wide, 16 metres deep and 18 kilometres long. In total, some 19 million cubic metres of stone and sand will be excavated from the seabed. This will be used to create about three square kilometres of new land areas on Lolland and on Fehmarn. When the trench in the seabed is ready, the work of putting the tunnel elements in place
