Posts Tagged ‘Fehmarnbelt Tunnel’
Road to prosperity A tunnel between Denmark and Germany is taking shape
Travelling by road or rail between Scandinavia and Hamburg has long meant either a detour through western Denmark or a 45-minute ferry between Rødbyhavn, on the Danish island of Lolland, and Puttgarden, on the German island of Fehmarn. An 18km road and rail tunnel under the Fehmarn Belt, the strait between the two, is meant to change that: once it opens, the crossing will take ten minutes by car and seven by train, and the rail journey between Copenhagen and Hamburg will be halved to two and a half hours.
Rather than being bored through the seabed, the tunnel is being assembled on it, from 89 concrete sections cast at a factory in Rødbyhavn and floated out one at a time. Femern, the state-owned Danish company building it, has put the cost at €7.4 billion, most of it paid by Denmark and €1.3 billion by the EU, to be repaid from tolls over some 40 years.
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The fourth section was lowered into place at the end of September, putting nearly 900 metres of the tunnel on the seabed. When the rest will follow is less certain. The tunnel had been due to open in 2029; Sund & Bælt, the state-owned company behind the project, says it will recalculate the schedule and the budget once six sections are down, which it expects by the end of the year.
On Lolland, one of Denmark’s poorest areas, the question is what the tunnel will leave behind besides traffic. The government has designated a state industrial park at Rødbyhavn, and the council says it has held talks with 15 companies, from offshore wind to defence, about setting up there. Not everyone is convinced that will be enough: the head of a cross-border business organisation has pointed to the Channel Tunnel, whose endpoints at Dover and Calais remain places people pass through, and has called for a joint Danish-German growth plan. Building the tunnel may turn out to be the easy part.
This briefing was drafted by an AI agent and edited by a human before publishing. All information used in the article was vetted by a human prior to drafting.
