Bridges and Viaducts in France — 42 Listed by Length

• 42entries listed
• 3.8 kmlongest bore
• 1930–2006openings span
• 58.12 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 42 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for France, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 42 rows for France are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2006 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

Lengths for France are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 800 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 4.8 times the shortest and 3.5 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

This page records the bridges and viaducts catalogued for France in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 58.12 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Second and third place go to Mindin at 3.36 km and L’Oleron at 3.03 km. Read down the length (m) column, the 42 values run from 800 m to 3 800 m with a midpoint at 1 085 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Further down the table, Millau is recorded at 2.46 km and Du Fayet-Cheddes at 2.28 km. The table on this page runs to 42 rows and records Viaduct, Length (m), Date of opening, Dep. and Comment for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Reading the figures

Dated entries run from 1930 to 2006, and the busiest decade is the 1990s with 11 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 9 captions rather than in running text, 75 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Roughly 6 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. Read down the dep. column, the 39 values run from 1 to 93 with a midpoint at 33; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

The longest stands 0.44 km clear of the next longest, which is the margin to watch when a new scheme is announced. The captions name 7 distinct places and structures — Nazaire-St, Loire and Tarn among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

14 entries fall below a kilometre, short enough that portals and approaches usually decided their cost more than the bore itself. The date of opening column runs from 1305 to 2006 across 25 dated rows, and the 1990s alone account for 8 of them, so the building effort here came in waves rather than evenly.

A new scheme in France would have to beat 3.8 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. Eighth on the list is D'Aquitanie at 1.59 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.