Norway greenlights first full-scale ship tunnel

> Having no map is weird.

Yes, a failure of both the journalist and the editor.

Sadly, this kind of failure is all too common. I encounter articles that often omit a photo of the "thing" the article is describing. This (no photo) might have made some sense fifty years ago in the heyday of paper print where including a photo was much more work. But today, for HTML publishing, it is just an indication of failure on the part of the publisher.

Also, having read the article + the Wikipedia page, the article seems to contain more or less the same content, except slightly rewritten.

Am I going mad or does the artist's concept look like the water is going downhill

There's no solid definition of "boat" versus "ship", but those are clearly a different scale.

Water depth in the Rove tunnel is 4m, and 12m in the Stad tunnel. They don't say at what state of the tide that is though, which I would have thought affects the size of ship that can pass through significantly (unless it has locks either end I suppose).

From Wikipedia:

Rove:

    Length - 7,120 metres (23,360 ft) long
    Clearance - 15 m (49 ft)
    Width - 22 m (72 ft)

Stad:

    Length - 1800 metres
    Clearance - 49 metres
    Width - 37 metres
    Boat-passable - 16 metres
    Depth of tunnel below water level - 12 metres

And do not forget the various military ship tunnels out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_museum_complex_Balaklava

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/21/asia/china-submarine-undergro...

There isn't a single, fixed definition of "ship". From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_nautical_terms_(M%... , "2, More generally, any medium or larger seagoing vessel. Smaller vessels or those used in sheltered waters are generally called boats. Exceptions include submarines, which are always referred to as boats." (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship#Nomenclature ).

The Rove Tunnel was designed for canal boats and barges, not ships. From a 1928 article:

"Barges are built for quiet waters, so their masters have looked with alarm at the prospect of taking them through the Mediterranean waves 25 miles from Marseille to the mouth of the Rhone. The new canal, after permitting barges to pass through the mountain, admits them to the Etang de Berre and thence to a canal which joins the Rhone at the famous old Roman town of Arles, 49 miles to the north" - https://archive.org/details/sim_national-geographic-school-b...

The desire for sheltered waters means these vessels were boats, not ships.

Looking through old articles and you'll see descriptions like "The 4½-mile Rove Tunnel floats barges and small boats" (https://archive.org/details/sim_national-geographic-school-b...) and " this tunnel will allow passage of river boats that previously found it practically impossible to negotiate the 30-mile sea trip from the mouth of the Rhone to Marseilles." (https://archive.org/details/sim_scientific-american_1928-01_...) but I found no mention of ships using the canal.

That said, "If you own a vessel in the UK that you intend to go to sea with" and the boat is "less than 24 metres in length overall" then you can register it in the UK Small Ship's Register (https://ukshipregister.co.uk/registration/small-ships-regist...), which technically means that something described as a "ship" could have gone through the canal.

But that's not really what people generally mean by ship.

Ask a Norwegian to dig a tunnel and they will turn into a gopher on meth. We are the undisputed champions of tunnels in terms of tunnel density. Show us a piece of rock and we'll put a big hole in it.

However.

Ask a Norwegian to fix a piece of road and you will be staring at a hole in the ground for 4 years while people will take turns leaning on a shovel in that hole while surrounded by at least 4 different categories of supervisor or inspector.

But to inject some realism: if they say 4 years they can probably do it in 5. And it'll take another year or so to fix fuck-ups that in retrospect will look stupid and thoughtless, but which are realistically unavoidable. We'll whine about it. A lot. And each week the whole country will be experts on something new. Like evil-sounding compounds for stopping water ingress or how to insulate wires. And then suddenly it starts working.

Reading the Wikipedia page (including the originally projected end date of 2026), it sounds a bit worse. Probably not Germany bad, but I wouldn't bet on the 4 years either.

not 40 years? seriously ??? (cries in Californian)

It's also a bit of a farce. The largest party in government (Labour) has repeatedly said no, this is stupid, it's too expensive, it's not worth it. Their junior partners, however, want it. And then one of the "fiscally responsible" opposition parties signaled that they would support the tunnel. So to avoid the junior partners splitting off and agreeing on a budget with the opposition, Labour now supports the tunnel too.

No doubt it will cost a ton and be derided as a boondoggle/used as justification for austerity by the conservative wing which indirectly made it happen.

Most of the Norway's Western coast (basically the extent of the country) is mountainous so building infrastructure there inevitably involves blasting the rock. At the same time the country is huge, bigger than Germany or the UK. So naturally a lot of tunnels.

This one a bit special: most of the boat traffic through it are meant to be ferries so it is to be commissioned and managed by the National Road Authority. At the same time it's quite unique if only due to enormous cross-section and can't share many usual national design solutions for the tunnels. For instance my company was asked a quotation for a PA system for it and it's really a challenge. So it's no wonder that it's delayed so much: it requires a lot of bespoke solutions.

Need them for trolls to move around.

The Dutch really like building dikes

I bet the cost-benefit is actually negative. But it is kind of cool, I guess.

Both entrances to the tunnel are from relatively sheltered bays / inlets. Swells would be fairly modest generally, though wave mitigations might still well be a concern.

See map: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stad_Ship_Tunnel#/media/File:S...>.

That said, I'm not finding any discussions of the hydrodynamics of the tunnel, other than this: "Ship Manoeuvring Study of a Vessel Transiting a Ship Tunnel", by Andrew Ross, Anne Bruyat, Leiv Aspelund, Vahid Hassani, and Abushet Simanesew (2024) <https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/OMAE/proceedings-abst...>.

Of course, the tunnel will be in non-euclidian space. So it is shorter on the inside than on the outside :-)

I'd be very surprised if this was AI, it's too bad-looking. The lighting is all wrong, there's noticeable repeating rock textures

I can't see TFA due to cloudflare, but there is a unique image style used in a lot of architectural mockups of proposed buildings and things that also looks very strange and uncanny. I can't find any examples of it online right now unfortunately, but could that be what they're doing?

I don't see anything in those visualizations that makes me think AI. Its completely run-of-the-mill architect visualizations that have always been atrocious.

> not laziness because they are using AI, but laziness to do their job right.

It correlates often enough.

It's the main lane where all coastal traffic passes, and one of the most dangerous and weather sensitive regions on the lane. Larger ships sail farther out when weather conditions don't allow for sailing the coast, but a lot of traffic including fishing vessels carrying fresh fish simply have to wait. So it's not as meaningless as geography makes it look.

Not this specific route, but it would be very useful for the Hurtigruten ships that serve the entire Norwegian coast (mentioned in the Wikipedia article, actually the ship shown in the tunnel cross-section has the Hurtigruten livery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stad_Ship_Tunnel).

as i understand it, the problem is not getting to Åheim, but sailing along the coast, where, in this part, the conditions are frequently bad. the tunnel is not a shortcut to Åheim but a detour passing Åheim to avoid the coastal area and instead sail through the fjords.

From Wikipedia:

> The Stad Ship Tunnel (Norwegian: Stad skipstunnel) is a planned canal and tunnel to bypass the Stad peninsula in Stad Municipality in Vestland county, Norway. The peninsula is one of the most exposed areas on the coast, without any outlying islands to protect it from the weather. The section has traditionally been one of the most dangerous along the coast of Norway.

> The surrounding waters, known as the Stadhavet Sea, is the most windswept part of the nation's coastline and is stormy around 100 days of the year, leading to ships often waiting days to pass through.[6][7] Currents, created by the area marking the meeting point of the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea further complicate navigation: Since World War Two ended, 33 deaths have occurred in maritime accidents within the Stadhavet Sea.[5] The official Visit Norway website has claimed Vikings would drag their boats over the peninsula to avoid crossing the dangerous patch of sea.