75-year old Maastunnel had been in renovation work which took 2 years to complete and cost 262 million euros.

The Maastunnel, a National Monument in The Netherlands is in operation since it was officially opened in 1942. It is the oldest tunnel in the city of Rotterdam as well as in The Netherlands. The Maastunnel has reopened on 19 August 2019 ad to celebrate the reopening of the tunnel, an old-timer bus full with Maastunnel enthusiasts rode in the tunnel.Also in the social media the reopening of the tunnel was celebrated with the #OnzeTunnel tag which means "Our Tunnel".

The Maastunnel is important for the city of Rotterdam, as it serves daily 75.000 motor vehicles as well as large numbers of bicycles and pedestrians. The tunnel has separate tubes for pedestrians and cyclist & mopeds.

On the first day of the reopening the tunnel had to be closed to the traffic for 4 times due to the height alarms. In one case, a municipality truck travelling from South to North caused the height alarm and the controllers stopped the traffic. Strange enough the same truck had travelled earlier from North to South without triggering any height alarms.

There is still some renovation work left in the tunnel for which it will be closing down at nights in the coming days. Also currently only the motorized vehicles tube is opened and the tubes for pedestrians and cyclists & mopeds still in some renovation work.

Opened in 1942, when Netherlands was under German occupation

Maastunnel ('Maas Tunnel') is 1373 meters-long and named after the river Nieuwe Maas (New Maas) whose banks it connects to each other in Rotterdam. It is the oldest tunnel of the Netherlands and it was built between the years of 1937 and 1942. At the time, there was a debate on whether to connect the banks of the river via a bridge or a tunnel. At the end it was decided on a tunnel because it was cheaper. A bridge would cost too much because it had to be too high in order not to block the passage of the ships from Rotterdan port, the largest port of Europe and once the largest of the World.

World's First Rectangular Underwater Tunnel

The Maastunnel was built using the sunken tube or immersed tube method. Separate parts of the Maastunnel were built elsewhere in a dry dock, and then floated into place and sunk into a trench dug in the river bottom, a technique used in many other Dutch tunnels after the Maastunnel. The Maastunnel was the world's first rectangular shaped underwater tunnel built in this way. Earlier tunnels were all of a circular design. Each of the nine parts of the tunnel has a length of over 60 metres, a height of 9 metres and a width of 25 metres. They contain two adjacent tubes for motorised traffic, and two piled tubes for mopeds, cyclists and pedestrians next to it.

(Maastunnel's pedestrian tube - image by trougnouf / CC BY-SA