[dachris]

Its sister tunnel - the Semmering Base Tunnel [0] - is scheduled to be completed in 2030. These two combined greatly reduce the travel time from Vienna to Graz and Klagenfurt (combined 1h 15m time saving).

You don't hear that much about great engineering projects today, yet it's still an incredible feat to build those.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Base_Tunnel

[mikewarot]

Holy cow... 16.7 Hertz[1] power?

At first that's a really odd sounding choice to this Hoosier. Turns out it's 1/3 of standard 50 Hz in Europe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_kV_AC_railway_electrificati...

[ErroneousBosh]

They actually used that in the US as well for railways. I remember a post years ago on the Classic Computer Mailing List from someone who said that their father had worked on the railways and pointed out that the "high bay" station lighting all ran off 3-phase 16.7Hz power. Apparently it looked okay at ground level but was quite disconcerting when you looked up and saw the lights flickering in patterns of three.

[usr1106]

It used to be exactly one third, i.e 16 2/3 so you can have generators on the same axle. However, being exactly one third caused unwanted resonance effects. So with the advent of power electronics it has been slightly shifted to 16.7 Hz. Within tolerance for the motors, but no unwanted resonance anymore.

My high school physics is not sufficient to really understand it.

[ekjhgkejhgk]

> You don't hear that much about great engineering projects today

Here's a great engineering project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_test_tunnel

[jimnotgym]

Serious question about hyperloop trains running in a vacuum. How do you cool the carriages?

[MattRix]

is it though?