After 24 years in the making, today there is finally light at the end of the world's longest tunnel. Today in Switzerland the first train is passing through the monumental Gotthard Base Tunnel, carrying Germany's Angela Merkel, Italy's Matteo Renzi and France's Francois Hollande.
It will carry passengers between the German-speaking canton of Uri and the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino in an astonishing 16 minutes. It will cut the journey time between Zurich and Milan by one hour.
Though you might expect a massive infrastructure project like this to be opposed by environmentalists, it was in fact welcomed. It will stop the daily journey of hundreds of trucks carrying goods over the Alps between Northern and Southern Europe, a journey which has been causing huge environmental damage.
It is part of the steady expansion of high-speed rail across Europe. Trains will be able to link up with Italy's impressive Frecciarossa trains, which whizz passengers from Milan to Naples in just four hours, at 360 km/h (224 m/h). New high-speed routes are coming online all over Europe.
