It's a shame that the legacy of the Cold War means that Hamburg is “closer” by rail than Berlin, even though if you look at a map you can see it shouldn't be. If they had built a tunnel to Rostock, things would have been different…
Even when the tunnel will finally be done, Deutsche Bahn will find creative ways to make it take five hours again.
The train left the Czech Republic with 0 minutes delay. Long story short, we crossed the German-Danish border more than FIVE hours later than the original plan. And it wasn't even in the same physical train, the original one got cancelled from Hamburg because of the huge delay we already had.
As for the reason of the delay, at first it was just German "normal" state of things, we left Bad Schandau (the first German station) on time, got to Dresden with 5 minutes (still "on time" according to DB), then without any visible reason got 20 minutes on approach to Berlin where there were so many people on the platform that it took some other twenty minutes for the passengers to get on and off.
When we arrived to Luneburg, the train stopped and after an hour or so the crew said that there is a problem on the line to Hamburg so we'd have to take another detour (from a detour!) and go through Hannover which added several hours to our delay. On approach to Hamburg we already knew that we'd have to transfer to a Danish train there, which thankfully went pretty fast and we left for Schleswig, where our train stopped again, this time because of a "fire in the vicinity of the tracks". After another two or three hours that it took the firefighters to realize that nothing was actually burning, we finally left Germany and the rest of the trip went just fine and we did not gather any additional delay in Denmark, arriving to Copenhagen in the middle of the night (instead of the original 7:30pm).
TL;DR: Sänk ju for trävelin wiß Deutsche Bahn!
Czech media even wrote[1] about how the train failed to get to its destination.
[1]: https://zdopravy.cz/prvni-primy-vlak-z-prahy-do-kodane-skonc...
That would’ve been an extremely long (and expensive) tunnel.
My understanding is that the water farther east is shallower which makes bridge cheaper. But not enough to be chosen.
The Transbay Tube sections were built in the Bethlehem Steel shipyards in San Francisco. A museum opens this month to commemorate that shipyard. It's in Dogpatch in SF, if you know the area. The shipyard still has a submersible drydock, but it hasn't worked in ten years and will be demolished soon, hopefully before it sinks.
The SF Bay Area once had far more heavy industry than most people realize.
It actually feels like they have a speed limit to scrolling, I'm used to giving my MX Master 3S a big spin and being at the bottom of a page near instantly, here it takes time.
Germany seems to be stuck at the "studying" stage before they improve the relevant rail links on the Grafing–Rosenheim–Kufstein route.
In my experience that means they send me to the other site that doesn't even have the article i clicked to, or even if it has it they can't redirect me to it.
Do they want me to read their article or not? It shouldn't matter where I am for that
Are they aware this question invokes anxiety to the visitor because many websites will show a different generic page instead of the desired one when clicking one of the options?
Ah, an old person on the internet from the days before it was balkanized. How great it was to live in that time that no longer exists.
Fehmarnbelt tunnel sections are concrete. I couldn't find how they are connected by concrete would make sense.
I'm curious what the lifetime of those gaskets might be and how you might maintain them.
Not really, mostly cause Sweden don't want to build high speed rail, even when EU would have paid for a big share of it.
EDIT: Found it! https://www.dn.se/ekonomi/regeringen-bad-eu-andra-tagkartor-... mentions it and that the possible numbers were really high, upwards 100GSEK or more. But only 'possible' numbers and not granted ones, so who knows how much it would have been in practice.
I wonder if Ryanair pays rail companies to offer poor service.
Then Dublin to Holyhead is, what, 70 miles? That's twice as long as the Seikan tunnel, which I think is the world's longest under sea tunnel.
The four leading crossing options would be the Kintyre (most northerly), Galloway, Irish Mail, and Tuskar (most southerly) routes.
Irish Sea depths (notably Beaufort's Dyke), and unexploded and chemical ordinance, are principle concerns.
I think the rail companies do it free of charge and Ryanair is happy to accept this business proposition.
8B USD for 11 miles
CACHSR IOS 36B USD for 171 miles.
The Merced to Bakersfield IOS looks like a bargain on a distance basis. I have no idea of the carbon offset or passenger time saving versus flying of course
I am amazed how bad software engineering has become with constant updates of software because of “improvements” or because there has to be constant release cycle else the software is unmaintained or bad.
While this kind of engineering is designed to be untouched for the next 15 to 30 years. Minimal maintenance is needed and certainly the concrete doesn’t need updating every second week because concrete has suddenly “improved” or there was a bug in it.
It’s become the norm to release bad software and fix it later, I hope this norm does not make it to real engineering.
It is combination of the German planning system, which allows the processes to be stretched out due to objections, and spineless politicians who don't really want to commit to a route and kick the can down the road (because whatever they do, someone will be angry; but voter's don't really make you responsible if the link isn't built or is delayed).
[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarnsundtunnel [2]: https://www.anbindung-fbq.de/streckenabschnitte/sundquerung....
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-07/los-ange...
(german source ... and very critical of the project)
https://www.nabu.de/umwelt-und-ressourcen/verkehr/verkehrsin...
Personally I like the concept of having a more direct access to scandinavia and see lots of other positive long term effects.
And then there is this tried and true tradition of commissioning studies with the sole intent to support a predefined viewpoint rather than taking an unbiased approach. This makes it so hard to trust any information when political arguments become heated.
To make the connection back to the tunnel: it consumes a huge amount of concrete and that releases the associated amount of CO2. Thisnpart is fairly easy to estimate. But estimating the impact on traffic emissions is fraught with issues. There are so many assumptions about lifetime, amount of traffic, types of vehicles that I can easily imagine the error bars to stack up to the point where a little tuning of model parameters gives just about any desired result.
This is a tunnel for Sweden, Norway and Copenhagen, it's moving the center of everything in Denmark closer and closer to the center of Copenhagen, completely disconnecting the rest of the country. A few days ago a new train start running Copenhagen to Oslo, a seven hour trip. That's the same time it takes me to get to Copenhagen by train within Denmark. Everyone is happy that you can "Get on the train and just pop to Hamburg, Berlin or Prag", but you can't, only if you happen to live in a few select spots does that work. It's a multi-day journey with a layover within the country if I want to leave by rail.
Internationally this is a great project, internally in Denmark, it's going to make international train travel worse for the majority of the country.
While software engineering certainly deals with different constraints, I don’t think this is a fair comparison. When stakes are low (as they are for most software engineering), different precautions are appropriate. The aerospace or financial software engineering worlds might be more comparable here, and the engineering for those systems looks quite different as a result.
See also: https://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineerin...
In Germany, twice a year inspection is mandatory for infrastructure [1] but this is only a visual inspection. Once every 6 years you got a large inspection [2] that includes a full go over everything including functionality checks plus a review of documentation (if it is still up to code) and of accident documentation, as well as a "knock test" on every m² of surface [3]. Fire safety systems are checked every quarter [4].
And out of these reports then you get action items. Depending on the severity of findings, it can be anything from "someone needs to do this until the next major inspection" to "holy cow stop ALL traffic NOW".
[1] https://www.stbapa.bayern.de/service/medien/meldungen/2023/2...
[2] https://www.fba.bund.de/DE/Meldungen/20230201_Tunneluntersuc...
[3] https://www.merkur.de/lokales/muenchen/baustellen-besuch-sta...
[4] https://www.autobahn.de/aktuelles/aktuell/tunnelwartung-im-b...
From the linked article:
> And I would say that the success of AI coding agents has proved once and for all that we had successfully built an engineering discipline so strong that we are also the first discipline that has been able to successfully run AI at large scale within our discipline.
Yet we have no real clue how AI works or how to debug it, it's a brute force solution to everyday problems. Daily there are new examples of AI "escaping" its enforced cage. Why? Why doesn't AI "just work"? Because we don't truly understand AI.
I think AI is exactly the opposite to "true" engineering where one understands the system and can reproduce it. After all, retraining the AI will probably give you a completely different AI even if the training data was the same.
Take the new sf bay bridge span. It leaked, and had to be fixed to prevent critical parts from corroding. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Caltrans-was-warned-o...
Projects are consistently over budget, late, and shoddily done in the physical world too.
We take advantage of the situation. If we invented some way of e.g. "growing" structures that turned out to be much cheaper we'd probably adapt our attitude to changing them.
Imagining building a bridge and then in the middle someone comes along and says it should also be a tunnel. I think therein lies a main difference to engineering and software engineering: planning and sticking to a plan.
Another thing are incentives: real engineering has real incentives to do it right, else you will get sued - by the families of those that died. Software engineering does not have this incentive to get it right.
https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/crossover-project/
I'm disappointed and jaded by the state of our craft like you. But I'm also very suspicious of claims that other disciplines are somehow these much more earnest, pristine, derived-from-first-principles things. It just doesn't fit my view of human nature.
Not so much that far South in Denmark, but the wikipedia article mentions a lake in Sweden that has its shores rebounding (moving upwards) at about 2mm per year. The Northern side moves faster so it is effectively tilting.
The tallest ship I'm aware of is the Pioneering Spirit, a catamaran / split-hull oil-platform service vessel, originally conceived as being built on two supertanker hulls. Given its mission, it might actually operate in the vicinity of the Irish Sea.
The maximum designated naval architecture stated vertical dimension standard I'm aware of is Suezmax, with a 68m (223 ft) air draft, shown in this Wikipedia article: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_ship#Size_categories>. (There are standards with unlimited air drafts as well, but I suspect most ships will fall within bounds of the largest stated.)
Oh, and another option would be for a tunnel-bridge hybrid, as with the Øresund Bridge, with tunnels to either side of Beaufort's Dyke and a bridge spanning that portion. I'm not aware of that being proposed though I suspect someone's thought of it. This would make for unlimited ship height through the passage overall. The Øresund span's clearance is 57m, FWIW.
The trend is that they don’t because there’s a continuous maintenance happening on all of those. There’s an army of people doing checks and repairs all the time. Even then, it happens, like in Genoa.
> completely disconnecting the rest of the country
If there's some secret plan to demolish the bridges to Fyn and rip up the roads and railway tracks on Jutland do inform us.
Otherwise, the Århus to Hamburg train will continue to exist.
> It's a multi-day journey with a layover within the country if I want to leave by rail.
No, it isn't.
While converting a bridge to tunnel mid-construction doesn't happen, what does often happen is that design assumes a particular construction technique can be used, construction starts with that technique, and midway through it's determined that an entirely different technique is required. This results in a bunch of redesign, remobilization, etc. Just like with software, construction often does not survive first contact with reality.
> Auf Grundlage der gewonnenen Erkenntnisse und der positiven Berechnungsergebnisse wurde in der Gesamtbetrachtung weder ein akuter Handlungsbedarf festgestellt noch eine Verstärkung als erforderlich erachtet
> (Based on observation results and positive simulations no need to act was derived, nor was an increase in observation deemed to be necessary)
The root cause is deemed to be errors made all the way back during construction, most probably too long exposure of the steel cables to the environment (see page 108).
Only thanks to this desaster the actual failure mode and how to spot it got known in the first place. The report suggests (page 110) that bridges of a similar construction type (and thus, the same weakness) be retrofitted with acoustic monitoring to detect snapping cables.
[1] https://www.dresden.de/media/pdf/Strassenbau/Gutachten-Carol...
Vibe code a bridge! Arf. I am sure someone will.
[0] https://www.trelleborg.com/en/marine-and-infrastructure/medi...
[1] https://www.trelleborg.com/marine-and-infrastructure/-/media...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08867...
[3] https://dailygalaxy.com/2026/03/rubber-used-in-undersea-tunn...
https://www.trelleborg.com/marine-and-infrastructure/-/media...
Didn't happen. The (fairly small) compensatory digging had the effect the engineers had calculated and the water flow actually increased slightly and the Baltic Sea ecosystem is fine -- or at least not harmed by this particular project.
I think we should trust the people who can (and do) make calculations over those who can't (and don't).
In the first link there the evidence is a statement from Hillary Clinton as well as unnamed other NATO members.
"WWF Germany, BUND (Friends of the Earth), and NABU (Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union), three environmental organisations who were avowed opponents of Germany’s NordStream pipelines with Russia, dropped their opposition after Gazprom promised funding for environmental protection"
And this says they dropped opposition that the russian state does good for environment elsewhere, not that they get money.
And the second link is about the peace movement which is not exactly the same.
