On Friday, October 15th 2010, the excavation of the Gotthard Base tunnel was finished with the main cut-through in the eastern tunnel, 30 km away from the southern and 27 km from the northern portal. Coming from the Faido section, the tunnel boring machine broke through the remaining meters of rock around 14:30 h.

With a length of 57 km, the new Gotthard railway tunnel breaks the record of the world´s longest tunnel (the Seikan tunnel in Japan has a total length of 53,9 km; the Eurotunnel is 49,9 km long). It is part f the Swiss Alp Transit Project, also known as New Railway Link through the Alps (NRLA), which also includes the Lötschberg and Monte Ceneri tunnels connecting the Swiss cantons of Bern and Valais. The tunnels facilitate the crossing of the Alps, providing a direct route suitable for high-speed trains. The Gotthard tunnel should become operational at the end of 2016, the travel time between Zürich and Milan will then be reduced to one and a half hours.

The tunnel boring machines have worked in the tunnel between Ernstfeld in the north of the mountains and Bodio in the south since 1996. The Sedrun section of the Gotthard Base Tunnel was secured with concrete spraying systems from the Sika-Putzmeister alliance. Tunnel builders worked under difficult conditions with four Sika-Putzmeister 500 and two smaller Sika Aliva-500 wet spray units. These shotcreting machines were responsible for initially securing the newly excavated stretches of the tunnel, using steel fibre shotcrete. With its vertical reach of 17 m, the Sika-PM 500 concrete spraying machine is ideal for medium and large tunnel sections.

The shotcrete was applied in several layers, achieving a final thickness of 15 to 29 cm. At a later stage, drainage material and sealing foils were added to the shotcrete shell. Afterwards, the internal formwork was produced, with a thickness of 30 – 120 cm to resist the enormous pressure inside the mountain of the Sedrun section. Sika supplied highly efficient concrete and shotcrete additives, meeting the demanding shotcrete requirements of this sophisticated tunnel project, like superplastilicers to reach the required long open times in combination with high early stregth requirements, and waterproofing membranes.

Apart from that, in April 2010 a concrete train including a Putzmeister BSA 1408E concrete pump and distributor was put into operation for building the firm surface of the railway in the Gotthard Tunnel. The concrete train is used for on-the-spot production of concrete employed for filling the carriageway. The fully loaded train with 24 wagons and a length of almost 500 m allows for the concreting of up to 210 meters of rail track per day.