Johann Herdina was born and brought up in Austria, in Innsbruck to be precise, which is convenient since much of his work, on the Brenner base tunnel and on other projects, has been in the Inn valley, which runs east and westwards from the city and is starting point of the Brenner Base Tunnel. “I studied in Innsbruck; I started my tunnelling career there around 1980, which is 42 years ago,” he says.
As with many tunnellers, the choice of an underground career was accidental: “It came by chance really. While I was studying civil engineering, I met up with a neighbour who was the head of a tunnelling company and I asked him if I could have a summer job for two months. He said: ‘Oh yes, I will send you to one of our tunnels.’ It was out in western Germany, near the Mosel. And as soon as you get started in tunnelling you get hooked on tunnelling and then you are an addict and you cannot get away…”
So, we have a tunnelling addict at the start of his career. Work on projects such as the Bonn metro followed. “I worked for a building company and then for a local very small tunnelling company here in Innsbruck until 1997; after that I became a consultant. In 2000, I began on the Brenner Base Tunnel, working as a project coordinator on the Austrian and on the Italian sides.”
The Brenner Base Tunnel is a huge project, and has been correspondingly long in the planning and in the construction. “Talk about it began in the 1970s; but feasibility studies and really getting down to the project did not happen until 2000. And, I think the job was done quite well because by 2005 we had founded a company, the BBT, to actually build it.”
The time-scale, he says, was in fact quite short for a major transnational infrastructure scheme – especially when you compare it to the Channel Tunnel, which was first proposed in the 1840s; digging on the final Chunnel route began in 1988. When Herdina joined the Brenner Base Tunnel project, back in 2000, it was still in the pre-construction stage of organising contractual arrangements.
“At that time, it was indeed more about how to construct the company that would build the tunnel rather than constructing the tunnel itself; and, basically, I was always thinking that we have to have one company working over the two countries, not two different companies digging each on their own side of the border and meeting in the middle.” Happily, that happened: “I was the founding CEO of the Brenner Base company, which at the time was one of the first European stock companies founded for such infrastructure projects.
“I think it was mainly the European Commission who wanted to have this form of company. That’s what they were pushing for, and it was of course the EU which was also financing a lot at the beginning and getting the project started.”
The Brenner Base company (BBT SE) is a transnational company of a type provided for by European law with half of the shareholders from Austria and half from Italy; its remit is phrased thus: “At the request of the Republics of Austria and Italy and the European Union, BBT SE is planning and building the Brenner Base Tunnel.”
And, happily also, Herdina was at its head: “That for an engineer was a very exciting part of my career on the Brenner Base Tunnel, because it was all bilingual in German and Italian, and it was in Vienna and in Rome, and everybody wanted the job to get done quickly.”
But, in the end, national disagreements of the kind that had beset the Channel Tunnel rose their head at Brenner Base Tunnel also: “National interests in Italy and Austria didn’t seem to have worked out as I would have liked them to. To me, it became clear that I could either work on the Lower Inn valley, on the section of the project beginning in the east and running up to the main tunnel portal, or I could stay in the Brenner Base company and try to manage that company. And, being an engineer, I preferred to go into the construction phase, which was 38km of really very hard tunnelling.
“That section of new line is a succession of quite a number of tunnels but essentially it is two long tunnels of about 18km and 16km, with a connection area between them, all in all a total of 42km of rail line.
“It was hard tunnelling not because the rock is hard – this is in the valley, not under the mountain, so it is all soft ground, gravels and sands and a very high water table. But since valleys are historically where the people live, you were very near villages: you have 30,000 people living quite near to where we were constructing the line. So that makes 30,000 people who didn’t want to have that railway in their backyard.
That was quite an interesting experience. How to handle the situation, how to get everybody to be happy with what was going to happen, with what they are going to get in the end – that was the managing perspective of the job. And then it was the engineer’s perspective to get things done.”
“If you start any large project, you will always have many people against it. And then you have to impart lots of information, have evenings with people and try to get nearer to them so that they understand why you’re doing it and to get a bit of a handle on what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. On the one hand it is respecting them, but you also have to earn their respect: it must always be that they trust that you will be able to manage what will happen and that you will be able to deliver what you have been promising them on the way.
So, I told them that they would not be hearing trains running through the valley because we would have cushioning systems underneath the rails, anti-vibration measures, the same sort of things that you have in a subway, barriers to guard against noise. We promised them they would not be hearing anything and that they could be sleeping in future without any rumbling of trains underneath their houses.
“And if, at the end of the project, everybody comes up and claps on your shoulder and says ‘Oh, it wasn’t as bad as we thought it might be’, then you have done quite a good job.”
Did he do that? Did he succeed in making everyone happy?
“Yes, that was the great success. Because we had achieved those things that we had promised they’re all happy now. I think I can still walk into any of the villages and towns in the Lower Inn Valley and some people will buy me a drink. The general feeling is that people are happy to have the new line because it is now giving them the chance to have many more commuter trains on the old, pre-existing line, which is now free from fast trains and goods trains and which can therefore run more commuter trains so that people in the valley can now commute to Innsbruck for work, which they could not so easily do before. So, their situation has improved as well as the situation of international travellers and trade passing through the valley.”
That was the management. The engineering side took some courage as well.
“We were passing underneath houses with quite large diameter machines. We had two slurry shield TBMs with a diameter of 13.04m running at that time – this was in 2008. They were Herrenknecht machines.
The ground was soft, porous, a challenge for the slurry to hold.
“That made me a bit nervous at the beginning,” he says, with no doubt some understatement. “I told nobody about it and kept the news to myself.”
So, what happened?
“It was quite interesting. The machine, of course, was heavy. Under its pressure, the gravel in front of the machine compacted and therefore became much more dense; and that meant we could keep all the slurry in and we had no problems in constructing those parts of the tunnel.
“It had been a bit of a risk. I told people about it afterwards, when it was finished, and everybody was happy at the end.”
And if it had not worked? “Then my career would have gone in another direction,” he says with still more understatement. “I would be somewhere else doing something else…
“But I think there had been no alternative. The machines were finished for the site, we had to start and see what happened. There was no Plan B. So, there was no point in getting nervous, you weren’t going to get another chance at it, so you just had to try to continue with your Plan A.”
Back to the present situation on the Brenner Base Tunnel.
“At present, they are still excavating. The Italian side has reached the border line with the exploratory tunnel but on the Austrian side they have still got a very difficult part of rock formation to pass on the way up to the to the borderline, so there is still lots of work to be done.
“And, as fitting out the tunnel gets closer, more discussions of national type are under way. Things like what type of catenary to put in are still under discussion and I think at the moment that they are having quite a hard time getting everything straightened out as to how they finally want to make it. The Brenner Base Tunnel won’t be finished before the early ’30s so there is still much to sort out.”
But Herdina has been otherwise occupied. For the past ten years he had been heading the hydropower planning and construction departments of the state-owned Tyrolean energy company TIWAG; a large part of his work is constructing hydropower plants also in the Alps; and, part of that also involves international co-operation on large projects.
“We’ve got a programme of building about Euro 1.5 billion of hydropower plants up our sleeves at the moment and expecting another at least another billion euros of projects over the next 10 years. So even without the Brenner Base tunnel I have had about Euro 4 billion worth of large infrastructure projects to manage here in the Tyrol in the last 20 years.”
“For example, we are currently constructing a cross-border hydro power project between Switzerland and Austria.”
The GKI project is on the River Inn – the river that is clearly in his bloodstream – and it will be both the largest hydropower projects in the Alps and one of the largest in Europe, and straddles a border. “For that again, you are looking at a state treaty to be able to build the thing, just as the Brenner Base Tunnel needed a state treaty.
“We had two Robbins machines on the tunnelling.”
On the GKI hydropower project, TIWAG used an alliancing contract, similar to the Australian alliancing contracts, to manage the project. Herdina is very proud to have introduced alliancing contracts for infrastructure projects in the German-speaking countries. Meanwhile, TIWAG is using such a contract also for a large hydropower pump storage scheme in the Kühtai valley. A TBM was brought from China for the project.
“That was a bit tricky because it had to be transported from China in the autumn of 2021, and, with Chinese harbours closed due to Covid, getting the machine here in time and then up to the site, which is at over 2000 metres, before the snow came – that was a bit tricky. We were lucky: the snow came late so we managed it in time.”
Is making hydro tunnels very different from making rail tunnels?
“No, they are both the same holes. Hydro has smaller diameters, which can make the logistics quite difficult. The one we are building, the Kühtai project, is 4.2m diameter but is 25km long and we are digging from one end only; so the guys at the face do not have a quick journey to work. At 25km an hour, it takes an hour each way so I tell them not to forget their screwdriver as they go in.
“Gradients of those long-distance tunnels are generally shallow, and unlike with a rail tunnel it does not matter too much if you go a little bit out of alignment and have to put a small bend in – you do not have a hundred tonnes of metal on wheels hurtling down it at 200km an hour. The tunnel that delivers water from the dam to the turbine house, though, is steep. The largest head of one of our existing power plants is 900m, so you have 90 bar of water pressure at the bottom, which is quite an amount for the tunnel to hold. That can be a tricky bit of engineering work.
“For our large dams, we always use earth-filled dams rather than concrete. The earth is excavated from the reservoir, so you get a deeper basin as well as material for the dam – a double benefit. Even so, hydro tunnels, like all tunnels, use a lot of concrete, which means high carbon emissions. But interestingly, when you calculate the CO2 balance sheet you find that within a year of operation of a hydro plant you have saved all the emissions that are needed for the construction – and after that, of course, the hydropower is carbon neutral. So, I think that is quite a good argument for still using a bit of concrete.”
“If we look to the future, a challenge for the industry is that very many old infrastructure tunnels will be needing refurbishment or renewal and we will have to try to do that while they are still in use because we won’t be able to shut them for a long period. The Channel Tunnel, for example, is nearly 30 years old now.
“We see it here in the Alps: the motorway bridges we built in the ’60s and ’70s were never designed for the high loads and traffic we’re looking at now. Strengthening them is really one of the most difficult tasks motorway engineers have at the moment. But they manage to find good solutions.
“But, of course, they are in the open air. Tunnels are confined spaces and work in confined space is always more difficult.”
Difficulties can, with luck, effort and ingenuity, often be overcome. “But that is the reward of being a civil engineer. You get these projects done and finished, and you see people enjoying and appreciating the benefit of them, even if they opposed them at the beginning. So I am very pleased that people of the Inn Valley are still willing to buy me a drink…”
