The first locomotive has entered the new two-way Beskyd tunnel. The locomotive delivered equipment for laying rail tracks, the Ukrainian Railways public joint-stock company’s Magistral media center announced in a statement. According to the statement, 900 meters of rail tracks were laid in the tunnel in the first ten days of January 2018 (2,350 meters, including the approach tracks).
According to Volodymyr Kharlan, the chief engineer at the Lviv Railway’s directorate for construction of the Beskyd tunnel, the contractor completed the entire construction work on September 26, 2017 and then handed the facility over to railway workers for installation of the relevant infrastructure (the date of October 4 was previously reported).
The tunnel is scheduled to be opened to traffic on May 25.
The new dual-track tunnel will be able to handle up to 100 pairs of trains traveling at speeds of up to 70 km/h per day.
The existing single-track tunnel is capable of handing a maximum of 47 trains traveling at speeds of 15-40 km/h per day. It was built in 1886. Its low capacity limits the capacity of the entire V Crete International Transport Corridor. The Beskyd tunnel is the only single-track section of the entire V Crete Corridor, which passes through Italy, Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Russia (Trieste-Ljubljana-Budapest-Bratislava-Uzhhorod-Lviv)
