Massive rockfall hit the railway tracks. 1 worker lost his life, 2 are injured.

http://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/news/new...l?cid=32837214

The line will be closed til approx. June 19th. There are busses between Göschenen and Flüelen. Travel to Ticino will take 60 to 90 minutes more than usual.

Alternatively you can take the route over Simplon.

Thanks! I was planning to take the train down to Lugano this weekend - now i'll have to make alternate plans.

It looks like it was some planned work that went wrong as opposed to a natural rockfall? (The translation wasn't 100% clear)

Think they were working to add/reinforce support to the rockface, but it was considered stable and okay to work on. At least that's the impression I got from my translation of the article. Condolences to the relatives of the dead and also best wishes for a quick recovery to the injured.

The geologist they interviewed on TSR news said it could not have been predicted - there was a completely "rotten" fault not far below the surface which they didn't know about.

As well-known Uri-politican Franz Steinegger a few years ago explained, the alpine regions is never stable but always "on-the-move". It may look stable for decades or even a few centuries, but suddenly things may change. Such occurrences may repeat and may repeat in even more drastic forms.

The person first reported dead is still missing.

The interruption could take up to four weeks, SBB says.

The line will be closed for at least one month. End of June in some of the German Bundesländer the school holidays start. So if you want to go to Italy or to the Tessin do it within the next two weeks or afteer the line is open again.

what do you reckon, apart from the german school holidays will the fact that the gotthard train route is closed + the fact that the gotthard auto tunnel will be closed 12 nights in june increase the traffic over san bernardino?

The area is now cleaned and secured.
The tracks are open again from today.

The Railtrack over St. Gotthard is again blocked because of landslides.
All international trains between Zürich and Milano via Gotthard are cancelled. Trains from Basel and Zürich to Lugano and Locarno (and vice versa) are stopped in Erstfeld or Göschenen. It's recommended to change the route over Bern, Brig and Simplon.

The duration of the blocking is yet unknown.

http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/panorama/g...hen-1.17801664

Updates from SBB:
http://www.sbb.ch/en/timetable/rail-...formation.html

That such things would occur again was predicted more than a year by Franz Steinegger, the well known Uri politician. He says that it in Uri for more than a century has been relatively stable in this regard, but that it now has started to "move" again, as often in the past over hundreds and thousands of years. It is the natural "shrinking" of the mountains.