The Kramer tunnel will be Bavaria’s longest tunnel – Bavaria

The dull, rhythmic wobble comes deep from the mountain and even seems to penetrate the rock. The force of the detonation propagates as a wave in the kilometer-long tubes, it takes several seconds before the pressure is lost outside in the open air. Raphael Zuber hardly accepts any of this anymore. He is at the wheel of a pick-up that was much whiter until recently and has to maneuver backwards again.

Here in the narrow exploratory tunnel, there will hardly be any oncoming traffic later on, and what is coming has right of way just because of its appearance. Over in the main tunnel, where the traffic is supposed to flow in both directions, they are now another one and a half meters further, everyday business in the hard rock: blasting, gravel out, shotcrete, steel mesh, concrete shell, a few dozen slender boreholes for the two liquids that Foam into an explosive mixture, crank the hand tool, ignition.

It has been going on here for a year and a quarter, at the beginning only during the day, but further inside it has long been around the clock, seven days a week. The miners have now blasted more than two kilometers from Grainau northwards through the Kramer. Raphael Zuber also wants to go north in the pick-up, and he still has to go south into the open and then right through Garmisch – past the yellow banners that demand what he has long been busy with: Kramer tunnel now!

There is not much traffic in the village on this rainy afternoon, otherwise it is different. On nice weekends, for example, when the day trippers are on their way and are stuck in a traffic jam at the end of the A95 in Eschenlohe. If you want to head towards the Fernpass, you will later torment your way through Garmisch, and the Garmisch people themselves are also part of it in their cars. There have been plans for a detour, which here cannot be any other way than through the mountain, since the seventies. In 2007 they were established, in 2009 the Administrative Court dismissed the last action brought by the Bund Naturschutzes, which wanted a different route. Drilling and blasting has been going on since 2010, but after three years the construction site came to a standstill. What the BN had predicted had occurred in the exploratory tunnel – namely water.

“It turned out that it didn’t work,” says Raphael Zuber, who has been head of the tunnel construction department at the Weilheim State Building Authority for two years. Some attribute the fact that the office needs such a department to the mountainous nature of the area, others also to the local CSU member of the Bundestag. Alexander Dobrindt was Federal Minister of Transport from 2013 to 2017; he approved the construction of the Kramer tunnel five days before the election and was already referred to as the “tunnel god” by the local newspaper. In his own opinion, the nearby Oberau people owe him the 4.3 kilometer long bypass tunnel, which has been driven through the Mühlberg since 2015. Another tunnel from the end of the A 95 to Oberau is being planned; the Farchant tunnel has been in operation since 2000. Because at the southern end of this expensive chain of tunnels, the large Garmisch-Partenkirchen would become the only bottleneck, there is no way around the also currently planned Wanktunnel around Partenkirchen and the Kramer tunnel around Garmisch.

Almost 300 million euros have been earmarked for the construction of the tunnel – a large part of this has already been used

After driving through the town, Raphael Zuber has meanwhile arrived in the north with the pick-up. Here the miners have been working their way up the mountain for a few months longer, but they are nowhere near as far as the south. At the “working face”, the temporary end of the tube, Andreas Granig squeezes his reddened eyes and looks doubtfully at the small waterfall that is coming out of the hole for a steel anchor. Granig has been in the tunnel for ten days, always twelve hours of work, twelve hours off. In the evening I go home to Carinthia for five days. Then everything starts all over again. Some of these cycles will still be needed, because this is where Granig and his colleagues are making difficult progress. Granig is standing with his control system in the middle of the dust and noise of the concrete sprayer, the nozzle of which is leading up and down a steel arch along the tunnel wall.

Open detailed view

Half a meter of pipe will soon be fastened again, then the excavator will come and tear open the shotcrete on the face again – piece by piece, so that all of the rock doesn’t come towards it at once. Because here in the north is the section that Raphael Zuber calls the “landslide area”. The landslide was more than 10,000 years ago, at that time a larger part of the Kramer massif had slipped and was deposited here as loose rock. The water in the mountain massif would have been a problem over there in the hard, dark dolomite, but here in 2013 the whole project came to a standstill. 349 meters were still missing in the exploratory tunnel, which will be connected to the main tunnel via cross passages and which will later serve as an escape route.

The 349 meters are missing to this day, at the northern end the ends of long drainage lances protrude from the rock. They were supposed to lower the groundwater in the entire mountain range so that it could be dug in the dry, but that only worked with a series of wells that were driven a hundred meters deep into the rock from above. All of this had to be re-approved, initially against the resistance of the BN, which was reminiscent of the hillside spring moors on the Kramer, but waived another lawsuit for alleged hopelessness. At the top of the Kramer, the water does not come from the slope, but from blue hoses through which it feeds the moors.

Down in the main tube, a whole battery of pumps is constantly sucking away. Raphael Zuber isn’t really worried about the small waterfall on the face. He has to keep an eye on the big picture anyway, the budget of 264 million euros, for example, of which 110 million have already been built. In the main tube, 560 meters are still missing until the breakthrough, Zuber plans to drive the 3609 meters through the longest road tunnel in Bavaria this year. That would be one less pick-up for Garmisch. It will take at least three years for normal traffic to flow through the tunnel.