The 6.09 a.m. train to morrow at platform one in Malmo Central will call at Copenhagen station - at a grand cost of £2 billion. Not since Denmark and Sweden were pulled apart by continental drift 7,000 years ago, creating the resund Strait, have the two countries been physically linked.
Today a huge and elaborate ceremony with music and fireworks, presided over by Queen Margrethe of Denmark and King Carl Gustav of Sweden, will mark the opening of what is officially called the resund Fixed Link but will be known to all as the resund Bridge. It is the Nordic answer to the Channel Tunnel.
In cutting the ribbon on this extraordinary engineering project, the two monarchs will at one stroke turn Malmo into a suburb of Copenhagen and make it possible to drive non-stop from Gibraltar to Kirkenes in northern Norway.
Taken in conjunction with the Great Belt bridge which connects the Danish island of Sjaelland, home to the capital, Copenhagen, to the island of Fyn and thence to the Jutland peninsula, the resund Bridge constitutes the last link in a fast route to northern Europe and the Baltic region, home to 100 million consumers.
The resund is one of the busiest ferry routes in the world with some 24 million passengers and 2.4 million vehicles crossing every year. The bridge's builders expect 11,800 cars a day to cross it, or 4.3 million a year. Not to mention the train service which will turn southern Sweden into the greater Copenhagen area.
The combination of road and rail has necessitated pushing engineering to its limits to make this the world's strongest cable-stayed bridge and its 10th longest.
The 16-km link incorporates a 4 km underground tunnel, an artificial peninsula stretching 400 metres from the Danish coast, a 4km road across a man-made island, Peterholm, and finally, a viaduct leading to a 7,500-metre bridge. The bridge has a free span of 490 metres and a passage height of 50 metres. Construction, which involved as many as 5,500 workers at one stage, began in 1993. Now a journey which took an hour by ferry can be done in 20 minutes by car.
It has been a long time coming. The first experiments with a tunnel between Elsinore in Denmark and Helsingborg in Sweden, at the narrowest gap between the two countries, date back to 1888 and a bridge was mooted in the 1930s. After the war, the project was revived with bitter arguments about the relative merits of bridge and tunnel.
In 1973 the two governments approved a proposal for two separate links, one road, the other rail, but the idea bit the dust after much debate and the decision of the Danes to cancel a related airport project. Another debate in the 1980s came to naught and it was only in March 1991 that a majority in both parliaments backed the joint road-rail link which has now been built.
It was to be funded exclusively from toll fees and, to everyone's surprise, came in under cost. Toll charges have been set at £24 for cars (with major reductions for regular users), £15 for motorcycles, and upwards for lorries. They should repay the cost of the bridge in 27 years, the bridge consortium believes.
The high charges have caused rows. Business people grumble that the high price is meant to keep down traffic for environmental reasons and to meet an unnecessarily short repayment schedule. "To build a bridge and then discourage people from using it is plain crazy," complains Hans Mller, head of Primant, an infotech consultancy with offices in Copenhagen and Malmo.
"The risk is that the bridge becomes a monument to stupidity rather than integration."
Many of the critics, most notably environmentalists, have been won over despite fears that the bridge would damage the vulnerable ecosystem of the strait.
Engineers were instructed to construct the bridge, peninsula, artificial island and to complete tunnelling, including the dredging of 7.9 million cubic metres of seabed, in such a way that the water flow would not be affected. Jan Danielsson, a Swedish naturalist and TV journalist and once a fervent opponent of the bridge, admits: "I don't think anybody could have envisaged the full extent of the regeneration in resund after the dredging operations. In fact the eelgrass and mussel beds seem to be thriving even more in the dredged areas."
Its social consequences are likely to be far more dramatic. The resund region has a population of about 3 1/2 million, two-thirds of it in Denmark, and is marketing itself as the gateway to the north. Skills shortages in Denmark are likely to be taken up by commuters from Sweden's rural south. New tourism opportunities abound. "The unified resund region will compete with Berlin and Paris for investment and jobs," says Morten Dam, in charge of resund integration at the Danish Trade and Industry Ministry.
There is little doubt about the enthusiasm of the people - 92,000 turned out two weeks ago for a collective crossing of the bridge, including a 94-year-old runner who had only been in training for a few weeks and declared it a great tonic.
Oh, and it's a bit of a stunner too!
