We hopped on a public bus for a quick ride to the Transportation Museum. This gigantic hard rock gripper tunnel boring machine on the left below greeted us as we went inside. As you can see by the people at the bottom right, the machine is huge.
The museum is also gigantic with exhibits on flight, cars, bicycles, trains and any kind of transport you can imagine. I would compare it to the US Air and Space Museum or the National Museum of the Air Force in Dayton, OH, which you could literally spend a week in. We barely touched the surface, but our tour mainly focused on train exhibits and the construction of the tunnels we will be traveling through.
Lobby of the museum.
In the winter especially, some people put their cars on the car train to go into the mountains for skiing. The price for winter is usually double that of summer.
There was an opportunity to join a tunnel boring shift, so I quickly suited up to earn some extra Swiss Francs for souvenirs.
There are lots of tunnels that crisscross the Swiss Alps. The Gotthard Pass itself already has two — the first, also for trains, was built in 1882. But the Gotthard base tunnel sets a record, exceeding Japan’s 33.4-mile Seikan Tunnel as the world’s longest — and it also bores deeper than any other tunnel, running about 1.4 miles underground at its maximum depth.
The tube bores through the Gotthard massif that includes the 8,200-foot Piz Vatgira on the way to Italy. It is part of a broader, multi-tunnel project to shift transportation of goods from roads to rails as many are concerned that heavy trucks are destroying Switzerland’s pristine Alpine landscape.
The aim is to cut travel times, lighten the traffic and lessen the air pollution from trucks traveling between Northern and Southern Europe. The two-way tunnel can handle 260 freight trains and 65 passenger trains per day.
Other exhibits included cable cars, early airplanes, Piccard submersible, and any and every other form of transportation.
After the tour, we decided to take a boat back to the Lucerne city center. The stature below entitled, "Joie de Vivre," was appropriately situated on the edge of Lake Lucerne.
My new friends, Juke and Fred, as we wait for the boat.
Our Swiss Pass cards enable us to use any form of transport - bus, train, boat, and trams to get around Switzerland.
Train station stop.
And finally this photo of grass growing on top of nearby roofs. I understand this is done to help cool the buildings. I have encountered very little air conditioning. Rooms have fans, and the windows open, but to me, the rooms are quite warm if not downright hot. Note to self: consider traveling in winter.
I wonder how good their snowplowing might be. I would expect that they've got that well figured out.
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