‘Ambiguity’ is the best word with which to conclude. Throughout my search to understand the Gotthard as a national image, I saw the Gotthard image recurring as often as I saw it slipping away. When I thought I understood, it changed face, meaning or intensity. It was everything and nothing; alive and dead; powerful and laughed at; used and abused. Through my Gotthard research, Swiss friends started to accuse me smilingly of being more Swiss than they themselves. Those types of comments were just as ambivalent as the Gotthard image. They made me reflect on my position as an outsider, studying a classical Swiss image: maybe the vehement search for the Gotthard image lured me into believing that the Gotthard image was omnipresent and thus I believed in its strength more than the average Swiss citizen; or did I become super-Swiss because I could tell the Swiss details about their national image they barely knew?

A lot of research about the Gotthard's context had to be done before I grasped the richness of the Gotthard image, whereas for many Swiss, the icon had gained a sort of self-evident ‘feel’ that had no need for nuanced scrutiny. For those Swiss the Gotthard figures as some faint, but nevertheless well-known set of associations, which, in a positive or negative way, evokes a feeling of ‘something typically Swiss’. By deconstructing, historicising and contextualising the Gotthard as a national image, I re-constructed an image that might not circulate prominently in Swiss society today. Or does it?

In 2007, the Gotthard Railway celebrates its 125th jubilee year. During the preparation for this celebration, the Swiss debate about the future of the railway line. The Swiss government ordered the construction of a new major rail tunnel under the Gotthard Mountains to link to the European high speed railway network.552 To create an environment-friendly transit of goods through Switzerland, the Swiss people agreed in a referendum to support rail infrastructure rather than the development of roads. The old Gotthard railway line, with its curves and steepness, cannot carry the projected increase in European demand for freight and speed. In contrast to the old line, the new one will create ‘a flat rail link for future travel through the Alps’.