Curiosity about the Gotthard as a Swiss national image gave me the impulse to do this research. In today's Switzerland, the Gotthard metaphor represents a nineteenth- century railway project, a symbolic alpine space and national identity. The construction of the Gotthard Railway took place between 1872 and 1882, a period in which national identity formation increased in Europe. After the foundation of several large nation states, such as Italy and Germany, people in Switzerland – founded as a nation state in 1848 – intensified their search for a Swiss national identity. For the Swiss the Alps became a major national icon. At the same time, the construction of the Gotthard Railway and especially its Alpine tunnel stirred the minds of engineering experts, politicians and a large interested audience in Switzerland and Europe. In the late nineteenth century, contemporaries commonly emphasised the blessings of large technological projects as fulfilments of a country's dreams. These parallel developments through which people searched to give meaning to both large technological projects and national identity made interaction possible. Hence, this research started with the hypothesis that the power of the Gotthard image in Swiss society resulted from the co-construction of technology and identity.

In my research, I moved away from the majority of existing Gotthard studies that focus either on the history of the Gotthard Railway or on the Gotthard's geographical importance. The interaction between the construction of a large technological project and expressions of Swiss national identity has remained largely unexplored and herein lies the novelty of this study. It offers insight into the multilayered process of the mutual construction of technology and identity. This is a subject barely touched upon in historical case studies on technology.

The co-construction of technology and identity played out differently than I assumed. Reference to Swiss national identity did not enter any of the major engineering debates about the chosen construction method of the Gotthard Tunnel. Even though a patriotic, Austrian tunnel engineer started the polemic, the team of engineers working on the Gotthard Tunnel construction did not respond with nationalist arguments to his allegations. They did not seize the opportunity to claim the construction of the Gotthard Tunnel as a Swiss endeavour or as a choice for a Swiss construction method.