(Finance) – Starting from 5pm today until mid-December the Mont Blanc Tunnel, that connects Italy and France, will remain completely closed to traffic for 15 consecutive weeks, until Monday, December 16. The planned traffic block, which comes more than 60 years after the construction of the infrastructure, is functional to the project of gradual reconstruction of two portions of the vault of 300 meters each. The traffic block is part of a maintenance and renovation plan for the 11.6-kilometer-long tunnel that will last 18 years.
There Closure of the Mont Blanc Tunnel it fits into a scenario characterised by the ongoing interruption of the Turin-Lyon railway line and from the overload of the Frejus. “There is no end to the worst. After the prolonged closure of the Frejus section, from 2 September the Mont Blanc will also stop. What should Italian road haulage do? Like it or not, goods are still transported almost entirely by road! The exchange of goods between Italy and European countries risks paralysis, not forgetting the usual problems at the Brenner Pass – he commented in recent days FAI-Conftrasporto –. Thanks to the intervention of MEPs Carlo Fidanza, Paolo Borchia, Massimiliano Salini and Pierfrancesco Maran, the European Commission intervened in August on the need to reopen Frejus. Now Mont Blanc is also added. The time has come to question the contents of the Alpine Convention’s Transport Protocol and we are ready to contribute by bringing the voice of road haulage and logistics companies”.
The organization – he said Paolo Uggè, president of FAI-Conftrasportor – asked for “an urgent meeting with the deputy prime ministers and ministers Antonio Tajani and Matteo Salvini and the European Commissioner for Transport to avert a crisis that would not only affect the road haulage and logistics sector, but the entire Italian economy”.
If Mont Blanc is closed, today’s news is that trains are reopening this morning. Gotthard Base Tunnel after the repairs required by the derailment of a freight train just over a year ago. For travel between Ticino and German-speaking Switzerland, trains are now scheduled every half hour throughout the day and all direct connections with Italy are back in service. The trinational connection from Frankfurt to Milan has also been restored, with Giruno trains now running via Zurich instead of Lucerne.
(Photo: Christophe Jacquet CC BY-SA 3.0)