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First passenger train safely through Gotthard tunnel

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The first passenger train passed through the Gotthard tunnel since a crash. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally

Swiss Federal Railways has resumed passenger traffic in the Gotthard Base Tunnel seven weeks after a devastating freight train derailment. 

A passenger train drove into the tunnel on Friday evening, as a photographer from the Keystone-SDA news agency reported.

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The train en route to Ticino left Zurich shortly after 5:30pm. The Federal Office of Transport had previously granted approval.

On August 10, a freight train derailed in the western tube of the world’s longest rail tunnel because a wagon wheel broke. There was immense material damage to the tunnel. The train driver remained uninjured. 

The repairs are expected to take months. Eight kilometres of track and 20,000 sleepers will be replaced.

Freight traffic resumed in the undamaged eastern tube on August 23. Due to the rescue concept, no passenger trains are allowed to run through the eastern tube during the repair work. 

According to the SBB, weekend trips are possible because there are fewer freight trains on the road then. In addition, work in the west tube will then come to a halt.

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.

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