Road Tunnels in Belgium — Complete List by Length

• 67entries listed
• 2.53 kmlongest bore
• 1933–2000openings span
• 31.81 kmtotal length

The record table

How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering

How this table is compiled

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 1.75 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. Where one of these 66 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Belgium, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two.

Lengths for Belgium are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 50 m and not a rounded figure. The 66 rows for Belgium are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2000 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

A new scheme in Belgium would have to beat 2.53 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 50.7 times the shortest and 7.6 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

Dated entries run from 1933 to 2000, and the busiest decade is the 1960s with 6 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 70 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, Prov. and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Dates for Belgium refer to opening to traffic, not breakthrough, so the 1933 entry was under construction for some years before that. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 31.81 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Reading the figures

The dated entries carry 18 distinct opening years across 67 years, and the median opening year is 1974. Read down the length (m) column, the 67 values run from 50 m to 2 534 m with a midpoint at 340 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Eighth on the list is Tijsmans at 1.1 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The tunnel column names 70 distinct entries on this page, Leopold III -Sainctelette and Belliard among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

Roughly 3 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 9 distinct places and structures — Bruxelles, Canal and Antwerpen among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The material on this page is held in 17 captions rather than in running text, 119 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together. Ventilation and escape provision, not bore length, drive most of the cost on modern road tunnels in Belgium.

This page records the road tunnels catalogued for Belgium in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Only 29 of the 70 rows carry anything in the date of opening column, so that field describes a minority of this table and the rest of the rows are recorded without it.