3-021-628 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The new overland route to India: the tunnel railway tunnel under Mont Cenis - south end, at Bardonnèche,1869. '...Bardonnèche [Bardonecchia], in the Piedmontese valley of the Dora, [is] twenty miles above Susa. It is separated from Modane [the northern extremity of the tunnel works in Savoy] by a mountain called Le Grand Vallon, through the heart of which the tunnel is bored, taking a direction from north-west to south-east, at an angle widening to a space of fifteen miles away from the Mont Cenis route. The two lines diverge, indeed, from one point near Modane, on their way towards Italy, but they cross different parts of the Alpine range; and the name of "the Mont Cenis Tunnel" is a complete misnomer, since it is not a tunnel to go through Mont Cenis, but another mountain in that neighbourhood - the narrowest of the Alps which separate Piedmont from Savoy'. From "Illustrated London News", 1869.