Tunnels and railroads

Opening a way beneath a river, a sea or a mountain, or getting the train across what seemed impassable. In London, Marc Brunel dug the Thames Tunnel (1825–1843) with a cage of 36 cells, one for each miner, under a river crowded with ships, and it took 18 years. The Channel Tunnel (1987–1994) used 11 tunnel boring machines, six from England and five from France, and the two halves of the service tunnel met with a lateral offset of 36 cm.

In Switzerland, the Gotthard Base Tunnel crossed the Alps for 57 km, with up to 2,300 m of rock overhead: it is the longest railway tunnel in the world. In Brazil, the Santos–Jundiaí Railway took the train up the Serra do Mar with four inclined planes, steel cable and steam, and the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad laid track through more than 360 km of forest, swamp and rapids in the Amazon, where almost every worker came down with malaria.

In several of them, the death toll is the hardest part: on the Madeira-Mamoré it ranges from fewer than 2,000 to 6,000 or more, depending on the source. Each page shows the versions and does not pick one.