They'd be handy ... Alan Drake is arguing the unpossibility of effective rail freight transport through even the mildest of mountain valley bottom terrain in the Appalachian mountains, and using the Swiss case to argue that nothing but base tunnels can make it possible to provide more rapid freight rail paths along existing mainline alignments in the western US.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.