June 19, 2026
Norway digs deep, commenters dig in
Norway greenlights first full-scale ship tunnel
Norway’s giant ship tunnel is finally happening — and the comments are already fighting
TLDR: Norway is moving ahead with a huge ship tunnel to help boats avoid a famously dangerous stretch of coast, with construction expected to begin in 2027. Commenters are split between calling it cool and calling it wasteful, while also roasting the article’s odd images and missing map.
Norway has officially tossed serious money at a truly wild idea: the world’s first full-size ship tunnel. The plan is to carve a nearly 2km passage through rock so ferries and passenger boats can dodge one of the roughest, stormiest bits of the Norwegian coast — a place linked to dozens of deaths since World War Two. If all goes to plan, construction starts in 2027 and boats could be cruising through by 2031.
But in the comments, the real storm wasn’t the sea — it was the mockups, maps, and money. One of the loudest gripes was that the visuals looked suspiciously sloppy, with one commenter accusing the architecture images of having that unmistakable AI-generated weirdness, saying the tunnel seemed confusingly tiny compared with the mountain. Another baffled reader asked why the article didn’t even include a map, promptly sending everyone to Wikipedia to do the job themselves.
And then came the classic budget drama. While some people were delighted — "That’s kind of cool" was the basic vibe from tunnel fans — others had already heard Norwegian media throwing around the word “waste” about the project’s giant price tag. The jokes wrote themselves too: Norway, commenters decided, simply really likes tunnels, what with its famous tunnel roundabouts and now a tunnel for ships. So yes, this is a major infrastructure story — but online, it’s also become a messy little soap opera about flashy renderings, missing context, and whether this is visionary nation-building or a very expensive hole in a mountain.
Key Points
- •Norway allocated NOK 8.6bn (£671m) for the Stad Ship Tunnel, enabling work on what the article calls the world’s first full-scale ship tunnel.
- •The tunnel will let coastal ferries and small passenger ships avoid the hazardous Stad peninsula in Vestland county.
- •The route is intended to improve maritime safety and reliability in an area with 33 maritime deaths since the Second World War and storms on roughly 100 days per year.
- •The nearly 2km tunnel is expected to cut journeys by about 56 kilometres, with transit through the tunnel taking around 10 minutes at eight knots.
- •Final bids for the main contract were submitted by AF Gruppen, Eiffage Génie Civil, and the Skanska/Vassbakk & Stol consortium, with construction targeted for early 2027 and opening expected in 2031.