Monte Santomarco Tunnel
Monte Santomarco is a railway tunnel in the Calabria region of Italy. The electrified (3 kV DC) line is 15,333 m long and was opened in 1987 replacing a standard-gauge rack railway line. It is a single track tunnel on the Paola-Cosenza line with a passing loop in the middle, about 800 metres long. History In 1905 the Ferrovie dello Stato (Italian State Railways) looked into to building a railway connection built between Cosenza and Paola; to overcome the steep slopes (the southern coastal chain had to be crossed) the normal gauge was adopted with a rack railway and a maximum slope of 75 feet per thousand. Work began between 1907 and 1911, with the line opening on August 2, 1915. Steam locomotives equipped with a gear wheel were used. In 1937 the FS ALn 56 railcar, expressly designed for the cogwheel line, made it possible to reduce the travel of passenger trains to 90 minutes. However, already by the end of the 1930s the troublesome maintenance problems and the excessive travel time pushed the FS to design a new line, however the start of construction for the new track was delayed, in part by the Second World War. The