New Elbe tunnel

Elbe tunnel
	South portal of the tunnel
use	Road tunnel
traffic connection	A 7
place	Hamburg
length	3325 m
vehicles per day	113300
Number of tubes	4th
cross-section	Rectangular profile
construction
start of building	June 19, 1968
completion	December 26, 1974
business
operator	State Office for Roads, Bridges and Waters of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg
toll	no
release	January 10, 1975
location
Coordinates
North portal	53 ° 33 '15 " N , 9 ° 53' 51" E
South portal	53 ° 32 '14 " N , 9 ° 55' 44" E
South portal 4th tube	53 ° 32 '8 " N , 9 ° 55' 51" E

Map with all coordinates: OSM | WikiMap

Aerial view of Hamburg (view to the southeast)

Elements for the construction of the fourth tube of the New Elbe Tunnel

Overview of the Hamburg Elbe crossings

The New Elbe Tunnel is part of the German motorway network and has a key function in international travel and freight traffic with Schleswig-Holstein and Scandinavia. The first plans for an “ Elbhochbrücke ” in the Reichsautobahn construction go back to the years 1934–1937. The longest suspension bridge at the time, the George Washington Bridge in the USA, served as a model . After the Second World War , the motorway route planning in the western part of Hamburg was largely taken over, but the Elbe was tunnelled under instead. Today it is one of the longest four-tube underwater road tunnels in the world and the fourth longest road tunnel in Germany . The nearby Old Elbe Tunnel from 1911 is only used for inner-city traffic.

Original expansion

Construction of the tunnel began in 1968 and on January 10, 1975, the new Elbe crossing was opened by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt with a festival attended by 600,000 people. With a total length of 3,325 m, 1,056 m are under the river bed and 2,813 m are closed tunnels. With the construction of the fourth tunnel, the 160 m of the northern grid section was completely covered. At medium high tide it is 28 m below the water surface. In the electricity sector, the tunnel was built with eight tunnel elements, each weighing 46,000 t. The elements, each 132 m long, 41.7 m wide and 8.4 m high, were prefabricated in reinforced concrete in the Maakenwerder harbor, which was dammed up and pumped out for this purpose . After the harbor basin was flooded, the tunnel elements were flooded into their final position and lowered into a previously dredged channel. Under the Elbe slope, a length of 1,113 m was built using shield tunneling with compressed air. The tunnel tube outer diameter was 10.8 m, the expansion was tubbing carried out of reinforced concrete.

The tunnel initially had three tubes with a total of six lanes, which can be individually blocked using dynamic traffic control systems. Depending on the traffic situation, the tunnel tubes can be released for one or both directions of travel. The Elbe tunnel is monitored by a tunnel operations center above the north portal, which is manned around the clock. This not only has the option of observing road users via numerous cameras and controlling them with traffic lights, but can also address them directly.

North portal of the Elbe tunnel
The tunnel operation in Othmarschen
Monitor wall in the tunnel operations center
Elbe beach above the tunnel with emergency exit in Hamburg- Övelgönne
Central fan structure (architect: Godber Nissen )
View in south direction in the second tube, without traffic
Anchor prohibition sign in the Elbe to protect the tunnel ceiling

Extension - fourth tube

Cutting wheel TRUDE

Since daily traffic jams became more and more the rule, especially in tourist traffic, there had been calls for a long time to expand the tunnel. However , during its coalition negotiations in 1993 with the Hamburg SPD, the GAL refused to further expand the Elbe tunnel. Mayor Henning Voscherau (SPD), however, found the necessary support for the expansion project in the newly founded voters' association STATT Party , which the CDU had also called for. The cooperation agreement between the SPD and the STATT party of December 14, 1993 therefore contained the passage: "The construction of the fourth Elbe tunnel will begin immediately."

The expansion of the tunnel by a fourth tube began in 1995, although the actual tunnel construction did not start until October 1997. On 27 October 2002, the 3096-meter-long tube was opened, which over the entire length with a shield tunneling smaschine with fluid-supported working face was built. The construction took place with a soil cover of 7 m to 13 m. The cavity wall is supported by 70 cm thick reinforced concrete segments. The tunnel boring machine TRUDE - T ief R unter U nter D he E lbe - was the largest tunnel boring machine in the world with an outside diameter of 14.20 m . The cutting wheel is exhibited in Barmbek in the Museum of Work . The costs for the fourth tube amounted to around 550 million euros.

Technical Equipment

Height control

Height control sign

The Elbtunnel has an automatic height measurement system at the access roads, which blocks the tunnel in the respective direction of travel as soon as a vehicle with a height of over four meters approaches. In this way it can be ensured that the tunnel is not damaged by trucks that are too high .

Emergency facilities

Emergency call facilities
Escape routes
Supply and exhaust air

Communication media

Numerous private and public radio stations operate a small transmitter in the Elbe Tunnel to ensure reception of local radio programs. Until a few years ago, only NDR 2 could be received in the tunnel, but now almost all radio programs that can be received in Hamburg can be fed in with a transmission power of 10 watts for a corresponding fee. It is also possible to use cell phones in the GSM as well as in the UMTS area and in the LTE area in the tunnel.

Refurbishment and retrofitting

As part of the safety retrofit program for road tunnels that was decided after several serious accidents with fires in European tunnels, the older three tunnel tubes were first removed from asbestos from October 2003 to March 2007 and then from January 2009 to early February 2013 the actual retrofitting was carried out. Three additional escape tunnels and a smoke evacuation system were built, fire protection improved and fire emergency lighting, escape route signage, emergency call niches and loudspeaker systems renewed. Since February 2013, all four tubes have been opened to traffic for the first time in four years.

Motorway operation

Each tube has two lanes which, with the exception of the fourth tube, have no hard shoulder. The maximum permissible speed is 80 km / h.

Traffic density

The traffic density in the Elbe Tunnel is regularly determined by counting traffic between Othmarschen and Waltershof. On working days with around 120,000 vehicles per day, heavy goods traffic is now almost 19% with an upward trend. The (theoretical) capacity of four tunnel tubes can be calculated at 14,000 vehicles / h (eight lanes, 80 km / h; prescribed safety distance). Taking into account the peaks during rush hour, around 15,000 vehicles per hour should cross under the Elbe between 7 am and 8 am and 5 pm to 6 pm. With eight lanes, this requires sophisticated lane management.

date	Million vehicles per week	Car / d ¹	Truck / d ¹	Design for
Jan 1975	Inauguration of three tunnels 0.39	-	-	60–70,000 vehicles / d
1976	0.45	k. A.	k. A.
1985	0.57	074,000	12,000
1992	0.72	k. A.	k. A.
1995	0.78	98,300	18,700
Oct 2002	Inauguration of the fourth tunnel tube	-	-	85–95,000 vehicles / d
2004	0.81	102,200	19,800
2005	0.80	101,100	19,900
2006	0.80	102,200	19,800
2007	0.82	102,700	22,300
2008	0.81	101,900	21,100
2009	0.78	097,600	22,400
2010	0.78	096,800	22,200

^{1 - on weekdays}

Tunnel syndrome

Driving in the monotonous tunnel narrows the perspective. When routing the tunnel at the top of the tunnel, the perspective is inevitably distorted. Attempts have been made to compensate for this perception error by marking the tunnel wall in color at the deepest point, but again and again you see drivers who forget to accelerate on the incline and thus cause a traffic jam.

Storage grounds

Since its completion, the Elbe Tunnel has had a regular place in traffic broadcasting on regional radio programs. Soon it was named as the north's eye of the needle . The main reason for this is the strong increase in car traffic, which uses the tunnel, originally dimensioned for 65,000 cars, every day. The selective accumulation of traffic jams directly at the tunnel cannot be explained by this alone, since the optimal utilization of a road is given at 80 km / h and thus the theoretical capacity of the Elbe tunnel is greater than that of the motorway that carries traffic. However, z. B. broken down vehicles in tunnels by the blocking of a lane inevitably lead to greater traffic obstructions than would be the case in areas of the free route (with hard shoulder or breakdown bays). The new fourth Elbe tunnel tube therefore has a separate hard shoulder in contrast to the three old Elbe tunnel tubes.

Since the interior cladding of the three older Elbe tunnel tubes is made of tiles, people in Hamburg like to refer to slow-moving road users as tile or tile counters . If a vehicle that was moving too slowly was recognized by the monitoring staff, the tape text was played over the tunnel loudspeaker system: “Warning, this is the police. Please drive quickly, you are obstructing the following traffic! ”Played.

Tube closures

Tubes are closed in the Elbe Tunnel for different reasons:

According to a blocking plan, one tube is blocked for maintenance purposes during the night.
Necessary remedial measures (asbestos removal, retrofitting of the ventilation ...) require the respective tube to be closed permanently.
Automatically or manually initiated blocks to avert danger. Reasons for this can be B. be a triggered height control, a fire detection, smoke in the tunnel or a traffic accident.

In the past, occasional closures with the aim of personal protection and the effect of larger traffic jams were described by the press as a system fault.

Punctual damage to the roadway and short-term ventilation disruptions caused short-term closures of a tunnel tube and obstructions to traffic

On November 6, 2012, the trial operation of a smoke extraction system led to the self-destruction of the exhaust air duct, which is why a tunnel tube remained closed for construction work for a long time.

On November 20, 2012, the altitude control failed. A crane on a low-loader demolished directional signs and the ceiling cladding along the entire length of a tunnel. This resulted in a blockade for several hours with an associated obstruction to traffic.

Trivia

The actor and comedian Mike Krüger was employed during his training as a concrete worker in the construction of the first three tunnels.

In April 1989 anti- tank barriers were installed over the southern tunnel entrances . The so-called drop bodies , cast from concrete, would have been blown from their mountings in the event of a defense and, with their 107 tons weight, could hardly have been removed from the roadways. They were removed in 2000 as part of the work on the 4th tube.

literature

Building Authority Hamburg Office for Engineering II Dept. Elbe Tunnel New Construction (Ed.): New Elbtunnel in Hamburg . Verlag Carl W. Dingwort, Hamburg-Altona 1969 (24 pages, with 35 illustrations and two large-format fold-out panels in the cover).
Detmar Müller-Landré (text) with contributions by Günter Niemeyer and Alfred Gajewski: Hamburg's new way under the Elbe. The tunnel . Ed .: State press office in cooperation with the building authorities. Krögers Buch- und Verlagdruckerei, Hamburg-Blankenese 1974 (32 pages).
Wolfgang Lohrmann: The development of the design for the new Elbe tunnel in Hamburg . In: The construction technology . No. 3 , 1976, p. 73-93 .
Ulrich Alexis Christiansen: Hamburg's dark worlds. The mysterious underground of the Hanseatic city . Ch.Links Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3-86153-473-8 .

Web links

Commons : New Elbtunnel - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Elbtunnelbremse - background information on the tunnel and the risk of congestion
Engineering under the Elbe - illustrated visit report behind the scenes