THE MONT CENTS TUNNEL,

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 166, 13 April 1871, Page 6

THE MONT CENTS TUNNEL,

The greatest engineering work of tho century of engineerinrr has at last

been .accomplished. The. Mont Cenis Tunnel is perhaps a more wonderful triumph of genius ami perseverance than the Atlantic Telegraph or the Suez Canal. Its length is seven miles and three-fifths, it is twenty-six feet and a quarter iv width, and nineteen feet eight inches in height, and will carry a double line of rails from France, under the Alps to Italy. The tunnel, which is of course unfinished as yet, has been cut out by atmospheric machinery, through the solid rock, schist, limestone, aud quartz, the air which moved the chisels escaping from its compression to supply the lungs of the workmen. The work has been fifteen years in progress, without reckoning the time spent in preliminary investigations ; it has been carried on continuously from IS6I till now. The railway up the Sion "Valley, ■will now, before long, carry its passengers straight through from Fourneaux to Bardoneche, and it will be possible to go from Paris to Milan without climbing an Alpine pass, or even changing the railway carriage. So far as railway transit is concerned, there are, therefore, no more Alps. The great mountain chain has been finally removed. This immense work has been parried out under vast difficulties. There could be no shafts, as in the short tunnels which pierce our little English hills, and the debris had to be carried back to the entrance. It was begun at both ends, and the workmen who thus started seven miles apart, with a mountain chain between them, have met as accurately as though thoro had been but a bill to pierce. As a triumph of engineering skill, we must mark this work as one of the new wonders of the world.