TBM Flavia, the huge boring machine that excavated the west main tunnel of the Brenner Base Tunnel, reached her destination about a month ago. Before that, TBM Serena had reached the State border in the exploratory tunnel in November of 2021 and TBM Virginia had completed the east main tunnel, arriving at Brenner in March 2023.
These were important milestones and many people noted them with interest. But a lot of you have asked us: why didn’t Flavia keep going toward Innsbruck?
The answer is easier than you might think, and it has to do with the rules on public contracts, or public procurement law. Even for international projects like the BBT, each stretch is built using national laws and rules. This means that the works in Italy and Austria are carried out by different groups of companies, or consortia, which were awarded the jobs based on Italian and Austrian laws.
That’s why Flavia started excavating northwards from the Mules construction site, but stopped when she got to the border. On the other side of the border, in the Austrian H53 Pfons-Brenner lot, excavation work is being done using drilling and blasting, not a TBM. It was the same for the exploratory tunnel and the east main tunnel.
TBM Serena, working in the exploratory tunnel, reached Brenner on November 24th 2021; in Austria, just over 400 metres of drilling and blasting are left to reach the border. The moment when the two stretches will meet is almost at hand: by the end of the year, the exploratory tunnel will be the first of the three tunnel tubes to reach the Brenner in Austria.
This is an important symbolic milestone, because it is the first tunnel to link Italy and Austria and bring us closer to our final goal: the completion of the longest railway tunnel in the world, in the heart of Europe.
