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Grande Traversée des Alpes

Hiking trails in France

The Grande Traversée des Alpes (GTA) is a long-distance hiking trail in the French Alps, connecting Thonon-les-Bains on Lake Geneva with Nice. It constitutes the southernmost part of the Sentier de Grande Randonnée GR5.The GTA was created in the beginning of the 1970s. It was soon imitated in Italy, where another GTA, the Grande Traversata delle Alpi was created. The Via Alpina uses some legs of both the French and the Italian GTA. The Grande Traversée des Alpes (GTA) is also the name of the association which manages the GTA trail as well as the French part of the Via Alpina and other projects in sustainable, interregional mountain tourism in the French Alps, located in Grenoble.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Grande Traversée des Alpes (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Grande Traversée des Alpes
Pon da Valunà, Briançon

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 45.1148 ° E 6.6092 °
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Pon da Valunà
05100 Briançon
Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France
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Fréjus Rail Tunnel
Fréjus Rail Tunnel

The Fréjus Rail Tunnel (also called Mont Cenis Tunnel) is a rail tunnel of 13.7 km (8.5 mi) length in the European Alps, carrying the Turin–Modane railway through Mont Cenis to an end-on connection with the Culoz–Modane railway and linking Bardonecchia in Italy to Modane in France. Its mean altitude is 1,123 metres (3,684 ft) and it passes beneath the Pointe du Fréjus (2,932 metres (9,619 ft)) and the Col du Fréjus (2,542 metres (8,340 ft)). Headed by the Savoyard civil engineer Germain Sommeiller, construction of the tunnel commenced during August 1857, at a time when both ends of the future tunnel were in the Kingdom of Sardinia. From the onset, the tunnel was an ambitious engineering challenge, its gallery being twice the length of any tunnel previously constructed. Some figures believed that it would take as many as 40 years to complete; the total construction time was 13 years, the work having been greatly accelerated by the introduction of new technologies such as pneumatic drilling machines and dynamite. On 17 September 1871, the Fréjus Tunnel was opened to traffic for the first time, facilitating a new era of interaction between France and Italy. The Fréjus tunnel remains an important link in the connection between Rome and Paris, via Turin and Chambéry. Following the development of car and truck transportation, the Fréjus Road Tunnel was built along the same path from 1974 to 1980. During the 2000s, the Fréjus Rail Tunnel underwent a series of works to modernise and improve it, including the increase of its bore to accommodate wider rail vehicles, such as container trucks on piggy-back wagons, as part of the Autoroute Ferroviaire Alpine. A future high-speed rail tunnel to improve transit capacity between France and Italy, called the Mont d'Ambin Base Tunnel, is being planned as part of the Turin–Lyon high-speed railway project.