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September 04, 2020 – 11:30 pm
Newsroom of El País
“The La Línea Tunnel is the most important work in the history of engineering in the country, it is a triumph of all its workers, to make a dream of more than one hundred years come true.”
The President of the Republic, Iván Duque Márquez, expressed in Quindío that “I do not want to say anything other than infinite thanks, because this is the triumph of an entire country, the desire of an entire country, and this is a tribute to those who worked this path and they always deserve all the recognition of the Colombian people ”.
The President of the Colombians was accompanied by his wife, María Juliana Ruiz; Vice President Marta Lucía Ramírez; the Minister of Transportation, Ángela María Orozco; and the Director of the National Highways Institute (Invias), Juan Esteban Gil.
Juan Carlos Villa, one of the Invías workers, who had been working on the project since 2008, recalled the most difficult moment of these years, when his family’s house caught fire, which he rebuilt thanks to the help of his co-workers.
The President asked to make a monument in gratitude to the workers, with their names, to whom he gave yesterday a diploma bearing his signature and certifying the work carried out by more than 6,000 Colombians in the bowels of the Central Cordillera.
Also read: This was the construction process of the La Línea Tunnel
“They, their families, their children, their grandchildren and all the generations that come, when they pass through this region take a minute, park the car and come to find the name of their beloved relative. Because this is your conquest ”, he specified.
The work and what is missing
The total project is called Cruce de la Cordillera Central and has two components:
The first is what President Duque delivered yesterday, September 4:
• La Línea Tunnel (8.65 km).
• Pilot tunnel (8.5 km).
• 3 short tunnels: tunnel 6, 343 meters long; tunnel 7, 904 meters long and tunnel 8, 627 meters long.
• 5 bridges and 13.4 kilometers of dual carriageway that will make up a pair of roads with the current La Línea road. To connect Cajamarca (Tolima) with Calarcá (Quindío) it will work with two lanes in each direction.
The Line Tunnel has an extension of 8.65 kilometers and will run between Calarcá (Quindío) and Cajamarca (Tolima).
Bernardo Peña / The Country
In the Armenia-Ibagué direction, the vehicles will ascend the existing two-lane road, reach the La Línea Tunnel system, cross it and descend on a new road that is under construction.
In the Bogotá-Buenaventura direction, the vehicles will ascend from Cajamarca to Alto de La Línea on the existing road, two lanes in one direction. The descent from Américas to Calarcá will be by the new road that is under construction.
Other data
The new Line Tunnel, which connects the municipalities of Calarcá (Quindío) and Cajamarca (Tolima) had an investment of more than $ 1 billion.
This work, with a length of 8.65 kilometers that crosses the complex Central Cordillera, becomes the longest highway tunnel in Latin America and the most representative work of Colombian engineering.
To achieve this objective, the Instituto Nacional de Vías (Invías), an entity attached to the Ministry of Transport, developed a plan structured by phases to determine the works to be carried out and resulted in a 30-kilometer dual carriageway, with 31 viaducts, 25 tunnels and 3 road interchanges to cross the Central Mountain Range.
The total investments of the ‘Cruce de la Cordillera Central’ project amount to $ 2.9 billion.
The Line Tunnel is one-way, but in two lanes. The vehicles will be able to travel at a speed of around 60 kilometers per hour.
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