Bridging europe’s North-South divide

With the Fehmarnbelt project, Europe is looking to bridge the divide between Scandinavia and Germany. Robert Williams reports.

When 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 Germany 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 Stockholm 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

can go ahead. Each tunnel element weighs 73,000 tonnes, however it can float in the water because it is hollow and sealed with bulkheads. Large tugboats will tow the elements out into the Fehmarnbelt, where they will be lowered down onto the seabed with a high degree of precision and then assembled.

One of the innovative design features is the use of 89 standard 217 metre-long elements (pre-formed tunnel sections) and 10 special 40 metre-long elements, one every 1.8km. These special elements – 45m wide and 13m high – contain two levels: a road and rail deck above a lower installation deck. The installations level provides the space required for all the mechanical, electrical and control systems, such as transformers, switchboard and sumps that are required to operate a road and rail tunnel.

Parking access for maintenance vehicles coming from Denmark is available in a special layby outside the emergency lane. Access to the installations level will not interfere with traffic and via this lower level there is unhindered access to all the tunnel tubes.

Up to 3000 people will be directly employed in the construction of the Fehmarnbelt tunnel, in an impressive effort that will see the fitting of 89 individual elements in a trench just below the seabed, where impact to marine life and shipping operations is minimal. The amount of steel used in the tunnel is equivalent to about 50 Eiffel Towers, according to its developers.

The Fehmarnbelt link is part of the European TEN-T network, a portfolio of hundreds of projects that aim to boost the cohesion, interconnection and popularity of the transEuropean transport network. It will have a decisive impact on the region, transforming the social and economic relationships between Denmark and Germany, helping to bridge the remaining divide between south and north Europe in the process.

When completed, it would be the longest immersed tunnel in the world, its 11-mile submerged section breaking down the sea barrier that separates most of Scandinavia from the rest of Europe.

Challenges to overcome

There does remain a barrier that is even more fearsome than the Baltic, before the tunnel construction starts. There are strong legal objections from ferry companies, who argue that an unusually generous model of public funding will turn the tunnel into unfair competition for their vessels. EU funds of 7 billion kroner (€940 million) are being given to the Fehmarn Belt. The fight over state guarantees for the tunnel had a hearing on the arguments in April 2018, and a decision at the EU’s General Court is set to come in the in autumn.

It is also true that not everyone is completely sold on the project. Danish reservations are smaller, but in Germany resistance is a little stronger. Beyond its contribution to the tunnel, Germany will lose some jobs in ferry transport and possibly tourism; visitors may well be tempted to forego a stop at German beach towns in favour of going straight on to Denmark.

It now seems that the earliest tunnelling can start would be the end of 2020. Nevertheless, it is still a question of when, not if, construction of the tunnel gets started.

Legal arguments aside, while the new link’s construction over the next decade is bound to encounter challenges, this project matters because it will help reshape the European map. It will have a decisive impact on the region, transforming the social and economic relationships between Denmark and Germany, helping to bridge (apologies for the pun) the remaining divide between south and north Europe in the process. n