Railway Tunnels in China — Complete List by Length

• 52entries listed
• 28.24 kmlongest bore
• 1987–2015openings span
• 728.88 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The middle half of the table runs from 14.15 km to 17.82 km, and that band is where most of the engineering on this page actually sits. Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 10.12 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens.

The three longest entries alone account for 79.6 km of the 728.88 km on this page, which is 11 per cent of the total from 3 of 44 rows. 22 entries sit above the median and 22 at or below it, so the table is evenly weighted and not clustered at one end.

Where one of these 44 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for China, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 44 rows for China are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2015 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

A new scheme in China would have to beat 28.24 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 2.6 times the shortest and 1.8 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

Second and third place go to Taihang at 27.9 km and South Luliangshan at 23.46 km. The table on this page runs to 52 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, Province and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Reading the figures

44 of the 44 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 728.88 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

This page records the railway tunnels catalogued for China in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. The date of opening column runs from 1987 to 2015 across 39 dated rows, and the 2010s alone account for 32 of them, so the building effort here came in waves rather than evenly.

Dated entries run from 1987 to 2015, and the busiest decade is the 2010s with 29 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 43 captions rather than in running text, 298 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 40 distinct places and structures — Railway, Chongqing and Putian among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

Eighth on the list is Muzhailing at 19.08 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The tunnel column names 52 distinct entries on this page, New Gunjiao and West Quinling among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.