Road Tunnels in Austria — Complete List by Length

• 116entries listed
• 15.52 kmlongest bore
• 1943–2015openings span
• 139.49 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The three longest entries alone account for 33.62 km of the 139.49 km on this page, which is 24 per cent of the total from 3 of 43 rows. After the 2000s the next busiest decade here is the 1980s with 17 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 10.39 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. Where one of these 43 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Austria, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two.

A new scheme in Austria would have to beat 15.52 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The 43 rows for Austria are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2015 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

The longest entry is 15.5 times the shortest and 7.2 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is. The ten longest average 7.5 km against 1.95 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

Dated entries run from 1943 to 2015, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 25 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 117 rows and records Country, Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening and Land for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Reading the figures

11 of the 43 measured entries exceed five kilometres, and those are the ones that carry a full ventilation and escape regime. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 139.49 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Eighth on the list is Bosruck at 5.5 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The tunnel column names 117 distinct entries on this page, Arlberg and Plabutsch (west tube) among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

The dated entries carry 40 distinct opening years across 72 years, and the median opening year is 1996. The material on this page is held in 43 captions rather than in running text, 441 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Roughly 36 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 34 distinct places and structures — Austria, Landeck and Works among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

Second and third place go to Plabutsch at 10.09 km and Karawanken at 8.02 km. The altitudes stated in those captions run from 1 535 to 2 990 metres above sea level across 19 recorded points, which is the dimension this page is about — height, where the length tables are about span.