Sighting post for the unfinished Saint-Maurice-Sur-Moselle tunnel

This border stone or ‘’directional pillar‘’ was used to align the axis of the western head of the ‘’railway tunnel‘’ Saint-Maurice sur Moselle Urbès‘’; ‘’tunnel‘’, also called ‘’railway of the Col de Bussang‘’ or ‘’breakthrough of the Vosges‘’.

Work began in October 1932 and was abruptly interrupted at the end of 1935 for rather unclear reasons, although it was due to be completed by 1937 and around 30% of the work had been carried out!

The construction site included a straight double-track tunnel with a length of 8,287 metres, which was the longest in France at the time.

In Saint-Maurice, ‘only 300 metres of the base tunnel were built’.

In addition to the tunnel, there were 4,636 metres of open track, which included several works of art. A viaduct was built on the Alsatian side in 1933/34.

In Urbès, the entrance to the tunnel was concealed by an imposing bunker built by the Nazis during 1944, when they turned the ‘tunnel’ into a labour camp.

In order to find all the technical details about the creation of the tunnel, the document (french) was compiled by Raphaël Parmentier, a local historian.