Railway Tunnels in France — Complete List by Length

• 40entries listed
• 50.45 kmlongest bore
• 1848–2011openings span
• 217.32 kmtotal length

The record table

Figures on this page were last checked against operator and administration sources on 2 September 2026.

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

How this table is compiled

The three longest entries alone account for 74.79 km of the 217.32 km on this page, which is 34 per cent of the total from 3 of 39 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 49.49 km against 167.84 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Where one of these 39 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 39 rows for France are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2011 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

A new scheme in France would have to beat 50.45 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 25.0 times the shortest and 14.6 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

11 of the 39 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 217.32 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Dated entries run from 1848 to 2011, and the busiest decade is the 1920s with 5 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 33 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.

Reading the figures

Second and third place go to Frejus at 13.54 km and Paris at 10.8 km. Read down the length column, the 33 values run from 2 014 m to 10 800 m with a midpoint at 3 092 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

3 entries reach ten kilometres and 1 reach twenty, a distribution that decides how much of this table needs full mechanical ventilation. Only 18 of the 33 rows carry anything in the date of opening column, so that field describes a minority of this table and the rest of the rows are recorded without it.

Roughly 4 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 11 distinct places and structures — France, Gere and Airport among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 19 distinct opening years across 163 years, and the median opening year is 1928. The material on this page is held in 6 captions rather than in running text, 45 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Eighth on the list is Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines at 6.87 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The ten longest average 12.57 km against 3.16 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.