Railway Tunnels in Finland — Complete List by Length

• 35entries listed
• 13.5 kmlongest bore
• 1926–2008openings span
• 33.94 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 12.92 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. Where one of these 35 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Finland, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two.

Lengths for Finland are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 97 m and not a rounded figure. The 35 rows for Finland are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2008 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

A new scheme in Finland would have to beat 13.5 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 139.2 times the shortest and 40.2 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

1 of the 35 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 33.94 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

The ten longest average 2.71 km against 0.27 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution. The tunnel column names 37 distinct entries on this page, Savio and Lahdenvuori among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

Reading the figures

This page records the railway tunnels catalogued for Finland in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. The date of opening column runs from 1926 to 2008 across 37 dated rows, and the 1990s alone account for 13 of them, so the building effort here came in waves rather than evenly.

Further down the table, Märjänmäki is recorded at 1.24 km and Keljonkangas I at 1.06 km. The table on this page runs to 37 rows and records Tunnel, Length, Date of opening and Line, comment for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Dated entries run from 1926 to 2008, and the busiest decade is the 1990s with 12 recorded openings. Read down the length column, the 37 values run from 26 m to 13 500 m with a midpoint at 295 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. A tunnel list for Finland reads differently from a neighbouring country's: 2 of these 35 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.

The longest entry is Savio, at 13.5 km, opened in 2008. 37 of the 37 rows carry an entry in the line, comment column — 100 per cent of the table — and that column is where the qualifications live: tube counts, closures, boundaries and the reason a figure reads the way it does.