Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link
The Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link (, ) is an under-construction immersed tunnel, which will connect the Danish island of Lolland with the German island of Fehmarn, crossing the Fehmarn Belt in the Baltic Sea. The project is highly controversial in Germany due to its general need, environmental impact and climate effects of more traffic. It will provide a direct link between northern Germany and Lolland, and from there to the Danish island of Zealand and Copenhagen, becoming the world's longest road and rail tunnel. Supporters claim the tunnel will be a potentially major connection between central  Europe and Scandinavia. It will shorten the travel time between Lolland and Fehmarn from 45 minutes by ferry to 10 minutes by car and seven minutes by train. The electrified high-speed rail will be capable of reaching . The project had a first financial volume of €5.5 billion, €7.4 billion when the State Treaty of Denmark and Germany was adopted in 2010 and recently approximately €10 billion (2022). The tunnel will replace a heavily travelled ferry service from Rødby and Puttgarden, currently operated by Scandlines, a route known in German as the "Vogelfluglinie" and in Danish as  Fugleflugtslinjen. Fehmarn is connected with the German mainland by the Fehmarn Sound Bridge, and Lolland is connected by a tunnel and bridges with Zealand via the island of Falster, which in turn is connected with the Swedish mainland via the Øresund Bridge. Although there is also a fixed connection between Zealand and Germany, via the Great Belt, Funen, and Jutland. Bridge proposal. Initially, a bridge was proposed. Feasibility studies had been carried out in the late 1990s, and from as early as 2000 German and Danish transport engineers were actively planning a fixed link bridge across the Fehmarn Strait, carrying  both a four-lane motorway and two electrified rail tracks. This solution was for years regarded as the most likely scheme and detailed plans were drawn up. The Fehmarn Belt bridge was originally expected to be completed by 2018. However, in late 2010, after further feasibility studies, the Danish project planners declared that an immersed tunnel would instead present fewer construction risks and would cost about the same. The bridge would have been about long, comprising three cable-stayed spans. The four pillars in the substructure of the bridge would probably have been about tall, with vertical clearance about above  sea level, allowing ocean-going ships to pass beneath it. The design of the bridge links was being carried out by the Dissing+Weitling company for its aesthetical features and by the COWI and Obermeyer companies for their civil engineering aspects. The proposed design would have carried four motorway lanes and two railway tracks. Tunnel solution. Although originally conceived as a bridge, Femern A/S (the Danish state-owned company tasked with designing and planning the link) announced in December 2010 that a tunnel was preferable, and the tunnel idea received support from a large majority of the Danish parliament in  January 2011. By 2012, therefore, the completion date had been pushed back to 2021, and in 2014 was estimated to be 2024, and then in 2015 delayed further to 2028. In 2020 it was delayed to 2029. In February 2015, the draft bill for the construction was introduced to the Danish parliament, and the Danish government submitted an application for DKK 13 billion (€1.7 billion) in EU grants, supported by Germany and Sweden.<ref name="Fermern A/S website"></ref> In June 2015, €589m of EU funding was awarded to Denmark by the European Commission under its Connecting Europe  Facility (CEF) scheme, allowing the tunnel project to go ahead. In March 2017 the operating company announced the sign-up of subcontractors for the project. The Commission has claimed on September 28, 2018, that there has been no unlawful aid. Action regarding this has been brought before court in January 2019, case number T-7/19. Project. This project is comparable in size to that of the Øresund Bridge or the Great Belt Bridge. According to a report released on 30 November 2010 by Femern A/S (a subsidiary of the Danish state-owned Sund & Bælt Holding A/S), the company tasked  with designing and planning the link between Denmark and Germany, the corridor for the alignment of the link has now been determined and will be sited in a corridor running east of the ferry ports of Puttgarden and Rødbyhavn. The Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link and its double-tracks will shorten the rail journey from Hamburg to Copenhagen from four hours and 58 minutes to three hours and 15 minutes. According to current plans there will be one passenger train and two freight trains in each direction per hour. The highway between Copenhagen and Hamburg is already a motorway except for  in Germany that is a two-lane expressway. The narrow Fehmarn Sound Bridge will be replaced by a new Fehmarn Sound Tunnel with a four-lane motorway and double-track railway. Design. The tunnel will consist of 79 standard elements with a length of 217 metres in a design similar to the Drogden trench, with two road tubes, one emergency tube and two rail tubes. Additionally, there will be 10 service elements with a length of 85.7 metres but both wider and higher with a subfloor (basement) to house technical equipment. Financing. When the Danish "Folketing" (parliament) ratified the project  in March 2009, its cost was estimated at 42 billion DKK (€5 billion). This cost included €1.5 billion for other improvements such as electrifying and improving of railway from single-track to double-track on the Danish side. In 2011 this was increased to a total of €5.5 billion (at 2008 prices). On top of this there will be cost of at least €1 billion for the German rail connection which will be paid by the German government. An expected EU subsidy of between €600 million and €1.2 billion will be given. Construction estimates  cover the period from 1 April 1998 until the opening of the fixed link in 2021. The Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link will be financed by state-guaranteed loans, which will be paid by the road and train tolls. Denmark will be solely responsible for guaranteeing the funding of the project at an estimated cost of 35 billion kroner or (€4.7 billion) and German participation will be limited to the development of the land-based facilities on the German side. The government of Denmark will own the fixed link outright, will be allowed to keep tolls after the loans have  been repaid, and will enjoy any employment opportunities at the toll station. The fees are also planned to pay for the Danish railway upgrading. On the German side, the road will be upgraded to four lanes and the railway to double track and, according to the treaty, paid by the German tax payers rather than by user tolls. The European Union has designated this project as one of the 30 prioritised transport infrastructure projects (TEN-T) and will support the project with a contribution, probably around 5–10%, amounting to an expected €600 million to €1.2 billion. The project  is expected to have 5% rate of return for Europe. New Storstrømmen and Fehmarn Sound links. Two new links are planned. One about long at the Fehmarn Sound and one slightly more than long at Storstrømmen. According to the 2008 Danish–German treaty, the bridges did not have to be replaced, and the double-track railway construction in Germany may be delayed by up to seven years. Because of its bad condition, a replacement of the Storstrøm Bridge has been contracted and is slated for completion in 2022. The Schleswig-Holstein state government announced in 2013 it envisioned the construction  of a new Fehmarn Sound link or an upgrade of the current Fehmarn Sound Bridge, since it considered the current bridge – with two lanes for road traffic and one track for rail traffic – to be a bottleneck for the German hinterland connection. On 3 March 2020, the German Federal Ministry of Transport, the State of Schleswig-Holstein and Deutsche Bahn announced that a new 1.7 km long immersed Fehmarn Sound Tunnel (German: "Fehmarnsundtunnel") with four road lanes and two rail tracks, costing approximately 714 million euros, is planned to be built by 2028, while the current bridge will be preserved  for pedestrians, cyclists and slow road traffic. Railway axis Fehmarn Belt. The Fehmarn Belt Tunnel's railway is the central section of the 'Railway axis Fehmarn Belt', which is Priority Project 20 of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) that seeks to establish a high-speed rail line Copenhagen–Hamburg. In the north, it connects to the Øresund Bridge/Drogden Tunnel (Priority Project 11) and the Nordic Triangle railway/road axis (Priority Project 12), and in the south to Bremen and Hanover. The full line currently under construction consists of several new railways to be built and old railways  to be upgraded to achieve at least a maximum speed of 200 km/h on all sections: Tunnel characteristics. Underwater tunnels are either bored or immersed: tunnel boring is common for deepwater tunnels longer than 4 or , while immersion is commonly used for tunnels which cross relatively shallow waters. Immersion involves dredging a trench across the seafloor, laying a foundation bed of sand or gravel, and then lowering precast concrete tunnel sections into the excavation and covering it with a protective layer of backfill several metres thick. The Fehmarn Belt is planned to be crossed by an "immersed tunnel". At  the planned , it will be the longest ever constructed, and will surpass the Marmaray Tunnel of the Bosphorus, Turkey. On 30 November 2010, Denmark's "Femern A/S" project manager announced it had selected immersed tunnel design submitted by the "Ramboll, Arup, and TEC" consortium. According to the senior project managers, as well as being the world's longest immersed tunnel, it will be the world's longest combined road and rail tunnel; the world's longest under water tunnel for road; the deepest immersed tunnel with road and rail traffic; and the second deepest concrete immersed tunnel. The size  of the project is about five times the tunnel part of the Øresund Link between Denmark and Sweden, currently the longest immersed concrete tunnel. The deepest section of the Fehmarn Belt Trench is and the tunnel sections will be about high, thus the dredging barges will need to be capable of reaching depths of over . Dredging will produce a trench some wide and deep. These parameters give a total of some of soils to be dredged. Conventional dredging equipment can only reach to a depth of about . To excavate the middle portion of the Fehmarn trench – deeper than below the  water's surface – will likely require grab dredgers and trailing suction hopper dredgers. The proposed tunnel would be long, deep below the surface of the sea and would carry a double-track railway. Arguments brought forward in favour of a tunnel include its starkly reduced environmental impact, its independence from weather conditions, as crosswinds can have considerable impact on trucks and trailers, especially on a north–south bridge. A bored tunnel was deemed too expensive. The precast concrete tunnel sections will have a rectangular cross-section that is about wide and high, containing four separate passageways (two for cars and  two for trains), plus a small service passageway: There will be separate Northbound and Southbound tubes for vehicles, each wide, each with two travel lanes and a breakdown lane; while the Northbound and Southbound passageways for trains will be wide each and about high; the service passageway will be wide; the standoff space between each "tube" will vary, but the overall width will be . The single-level, sectional arrangement of the two road and rail tubes side-by- side – with the road West and the railway East – coincide with the arrangement of the existing road and rail infrastructure and requires  no weaving to connect. Criticism. The crossing has been discussed for more than 30 years. At the beginning of that period, before the reunification of Germany, the only possible link was towards Hamburg, as going towards Communist East Germany was not a viable option. Although times have changed and Europe has been politically and economically reshaped in the meantime, the plans for the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link have stayed the course. The Cold War era conceptualization of the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link has been highly criticized, as some see connecting the two capitals of Copenhagen and Berlin and on a  larger scale, a link from Scandinavia to the former Warsaw Pact countries as a priority of the utmost importance. A Gedser–Rostock Bridge, about further east, has been proposed as an alternative or to complement the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link, as this alternative proposal would better connect eastern Germany including Berlin and places further east and south with Scandinavia. Despite an offer to help offset the costs of the tunnel by the Danish Cyclists' Federation, it is not planned to include a cycle path. There have been objections from local people on the German side, both from those fearing the  loss of jobs in connection with the present busy ferry traffic, and from environmental protectionists who believed that wildlife would suffer from the construction of the originally conceived bridge. At the same time, employment connected to construction works would be only short-term, while residents would suffer from the increase in traffic, especially with the planned freight trains which would move from the present Jutland-Great Belt Fixed Link route. In particular, there are concerns with the potential increase of train noise for some residents with moving the freight train traffic from the current route to this new route. These  critics have been the loudest and they have been able to get a realignment of the planned railway route. The present Hamburg freight rail bypass used today for the freight traffic, is disturbing more people than the villages north of Lübeck. Furthermore, it is claimed that the project might be economically unjustified, as predictions of passenger traffic and goods transport may be overestimated and there is a considerable risk that the investment will not be recouped. The European Court of Auditors has criticised the planning of the German land connection for letting cost rise uncontrolled. This cost is more than  double what would be if following the legal requirements for a 160 km/h railway (the originally decided speed). Local lobbyists have been allowed to get things such as realignment and extra noise protection. In 2019, the Bundesrechnungshof commented that "in view of the current traffic forecasts, it is questionable whether the benefits of the project will increase to such an extent that the expected costs are justified under economic aspects". Support. There are complaints from some Swedish politicians over the long train travel times between Copenhagen and Hamburg and the lack of night trains, which are impractical to load  aboard the ferries. This makes train travel, for example from Stockholm to Brussels, impossible unless one night is spent in a hotel en route. The Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link would improve this considerably. The Swedish government has in 2020 decided to financially support international night trains Malmö-Brussels which are expected to run in 2022 (connecting to a train from Stockholm, needing 17 hours Stockholm-Brussels).