The Brenner Base Tunnel is one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects in Europe — a 64-kilometre rail tunnel boring straight through the Alps between Austria and Italy. When complete, it will be the longest underground rail link in the world, rerouting freight off the congested mountain pass roads and onto electrified rail.

This short claymation-style documentary tackles the project from a fresh angle. Rather than the standard drone-footage-and-narrator format, it uses a charming stop-motion aesthetic to walk through the geology, the engineering challenges of tunnelling under shifting alpine rock, and the political coordination required between two countries to align bores meeting in the middle.

It's a small channel (only 99 subscribers) and the AI-assisted production style means visuals occasionally feel uncanny, but the underlying content covers real ground: tunnel boring machine operation, the role of pilot tunnels for geological surveying, and why high-speed rail under mountains is a genuinely transformative piece of infrastructure for European logistics and climate goals.

At a time when most infrastructure coverage focuses on what's not getting built, it's refreshing to see an explainer about a megaproject actually progressing toward its 2032 completion.