For my 4000th contribution on Railpictures, I hand-picked this onetime picture, shot on march 18th 2016 at 02.18 PM: We have a look down from the mountain, about 500 meter above the valley floor, to the south portal of the Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT), 57 kilometer long between Erstfeld and Pollegio through the Alps, which will be inaugurated on 1st of june, exactly in 8 weeks from now. A test train with locomotive Re 460 # 084 and four cars left the east bore of the tunnel some minutes ago and brought some technicians to the fresh air. In this moment, two highspeed tilting trains are meeting on the "old" Gotthard mountain line, which was newly laid in this part some years ago. One train is the ICN 671 from Basel via Lucerne to Lugano, which is run by an ETR 610 since change of timetable in december 2015. The other is Eurocity 16 from Milan to Zürich. If both would have been on time exactly, they would have met in Biasca, about 5 kilometer from here. But train 671 had about 8 minutes delay and train 16 about only 2 minutes, so there meeting was just here above the GBT south portal. A very lucky and unique shot.
