Pride and euphoria swept through Switzerland last week when a gargantuan drilling machine emerged through the rocks deep under the Alps to join the two ends of the world’s longest railroad tunnel. The 35-mile Gotthard Base Tunnel is an extraordinary engineering achievement: over 12 years, 2,600 workers battled dust, noise and heat beneath up to 1.5 miles of mountain to remove 23 million tons of rock — the equivalent of moving five Grand Pyramids of Cheops
