Railway Tunnels in China — 25 Listed by Length

• 25entries listed
• 9.39 kmlongest bore
• 1966–2004openings span
• 139.8 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 26.96 km of the 139.8 km on this page, which is 19 per cent of the total from 3 of 23 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 53.12 km against 86.68 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Where one of these 23 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 23 rows for China are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2004 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

19 of the 23 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 139.8 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Dated entries run from 1966 to 2004, and the busiest decade is the 1970s with 7 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 25 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening and Line, notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

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 1966 to 2004 across 19 dated rows, and the 1970s alone account for 7 of them, so the building effort here came in waves rather than evenly.

Reading the figures

A new scheme in China would have to beat 9.39 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 3.1 times the shortest and 1.5 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

The ten longest average 7.45 km against 5.03 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution. The tunnel column names 25 distinct entries on this page, Mihualing and Jindong among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

Read down the length (m) column, the 25 values run from 3 005 m to 9 392 m with a midpoint at 6 061 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is. Base tunnels driven low through a massif appear here beside the older summit tunnels they replaced.

Second and third place go to Jindong at 9.11 km and Jundushan at 8.46 km. A tunnel list for China reads differently from a neighbouring country's: 23 of these 23 structures pass three kilometres, and the same journey time is bought with one long bore in one country and a dozen short ones in another.

Eighth on the list is Bapanling at 6.34 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The dated entries fall across 18 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes.