Under Mont Blanc

Since Caesar's legions and Hannibal's elephants crossed the Alps on footpaths, man has been waging a slow battle to conquer Europe's rock curtain. In 1800 Napoleon widened the Alpine trails and made them military roads. By 1820 the St. Gotthard pass had been widened to 18 feet, enough for two-way carriage traffic, but only in summer. Then in 1870 the eight-mile Mount Cenis railway tunnel, an engineering marvel in its day, was holed through.

Last week the Alps faced their final defeat. As soon as the snow clears this spring, a French-Italian-Swiss company announced, work will begin on the world's longest automobile tunnel, which will pass right through Mont Blanc, the highest of all the Alps (15,781 ft.).

Truck Traffic. The seven-mile tunnel, to be finished in three years, will give Europe its first satisfactory truck route to link the industrial complexes of Italy with France, Germany and the Low Countries. Truck traffic over the Alps now takes a road full of steep grades and blocked seven to eight months out of twelve by snow. An alternative all-year route along the Mediterranean is shunned by truckers as hilly and hairpinnish. For tourists, the new tunnel will shorten the present Paris-Rome trip by 85 miles and many low-geared climbing hours.

Locally, the new Route blanche highway will bring together in trade the Chamonix valley on the French side of the mountain and the Aosta valley on the Italian. Aosta hydroelectric projects will be able to pipe power cheaply to France through the tunnel; snowslides make it impracticable to run high tension cables over the Alps.

The 50-ft.-wide tunnel will have four lanes and a 15-ft. ceiling, two feet higher than in New York's new Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. It will be more than -three times as long as the present longest highway tunnel, the 2.16-mile tube under the Mersey at Liverpool, England. A 9-ft. duct under the roadway will bring in fresh air, and a duct in the ceiling, with blowers, will take off carbon monoxide.

Fifteen-Minute Toll. To dig the tunnel, contractors will use a mammoth U.S. cutter which fits the tube, rides along on rails, permits 24 electric drills to work at once. Most of Mont Blanc is solid granite, and (with electric drills) this is to the good: in 1880 workers digging the St. Gotthard tunnel in a less solid mountain were killed by rock lapses.

Toll for the 15-minute trip under the Alps will be about $1.50, which should amortize the $20 million cost fairly rapidly. The project has been discussed for decades without anything happening, but now at last the outlook is rosy--although the older burghers on both sides still have misgivings about the risk of new Caesars and new Hannibals.

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