Hallandsås Tunnel

Hallandsås Tunnel

The red, dotted line shows the tunnel. The red-white dashed line shows new, connecting railway, and the black-white dashed line shows the previous railway stretch.
Overview
Line	West Coast Line
Location	Båstad Municipality, Skåne County
Status	Open
Start	Förslöv 56°21′43″N 12°48′20″E / 56.36194°N 12.80556°E / 56.36194; 12.80556
End	Båstad 56°25′28″N 12°53′20″E / 56.42444°N 12.88889°E / 56.42444; 12.88889
Operation
Work begun	1992 (restart 2003)
Opened	8 December, 2015
Traffic	Railway
Technical
Length	8.7 km (5.4 mi)

The Hallandsås Tunnel (Swedish: Hallandsåstunneln), also known as the Hallandsås Ridge Tunnel or Scanlink, is a railway tunnel in Sweden. It connects the northern and the southern sides of the Hallandsås geological formation (a horst). The length is 8.7 km (5.4 mi) (8,722 metres (28,615 ft) in one bore, 8,710 metres (28,576 ft) in the other). It's utilised by the West Coast Line, on the section between Ängelholm and Halmstad in southwestern Sweden. It has improved the connection between the cities of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Copenhagen, Denmark. In the longer term it will be a key component in the proposed Oslo to Hamburg high speed rail link via Gothenburg, Malmö and Copenhagen.

The project was troubled by construction difficulties caused by groundwater ingress, and a scandal when dangerous sealant materials were used causing workers to become ill and killing local fish and cattle. These caused the project to be halted from late 1997 to 2005, and resulted in large cost over-runs. The project was finished in December 2015, over 23 years after start of construction.

The tunnel is part of a larger project to upgrade the whole West Coast Line to double track. In the context of this project, the single-track stretch over the Hallandsås ridge was both too curvy and steep to allow for easy double-track conversion and still allow for high-speed passenger trains and heavy freight trains. Additionally, this stretch contained 13 level crossings, the single-track Båstad station, and a passing loop at Grevie at which trains must meet (and accumulate significant delays if one or both trains are late). In order to avoid this bottleneck, some passenger train services between Gothenburg and Malmö, as well as most freight trains, took a long detour along the Halmstad–Hässleholm railway (which is also too steep for efficient freight traffic) and on the congested Hässleholm–Malmö railway.