Building the World’s Longest Railway Tunnel

To construct the Gotthard Base Tunnel through the Swiss Alps, four boring machines worked 24 hours a day for seven years. While the completed tunnel is 35 miles (57km) long, the project included a secondary tunnel and four access tunnels. Success meant cutting through 94 miles (151km) of solid granite.

Each boring machine used 130 Timken bearings on its cutter face. As you can imagine, those bearings endured some stressful conditions and had to be refreshed from time to time. All told, Timken delivered a total of 25,000 bearings to keep the project moving.

When you’re building the longest railway tunnel in the world, you don’t have time to wait for bearing replacements. Because of our vast distribution network, Timken was able to deliver the right bearings at the right time. Every time.

Is Timken the solution for your next big engineering feat?
The short answer is Yes.
See why.

Last Updated: 2024/11/27

Published: 2018/09/20