Railway Tunnels in India — 13 Listed by Length

• 13entries listed
• 11.22 kmlongest bore
• 1998–2013openings span
• 52.46 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 13 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for India, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 13 rows for India are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2013 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

The three longest entries alone account for 22.11 km of the 52.46 km on this page, which is 42 per cent of the total from 3 of 13 rows. Only Pir Panjal sits within ten per cent of the longest figure, so one structure stands 4.71 km clear of the field here.

Dated entries run from 1998 to 2013, and the busiest decade is the 1990s with 9 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 13 rows and records Tunnel, Length, Date of opening, Region and Line, section for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Second and third place go to Karbude at 6.51 km and Natuwadi at 4.39 km. Read down the length column, the 13 values run from 2 000 m to 11 215 m with a midpoint at 3 343 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

2 of the 13 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 52.46 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Reading the figures

Roughly 3 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 8 distinct places and structures — Srinagar, Katra and Jammu among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

A new scheme in India would have to beat 11.22 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 5.6 times the shortest and 3.4 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

Eighth on the list is Tunnel no at 3.2 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The ten longest average 4.58 km against 2.22 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

The earliest dated entry is Karbude, opened in 1998, and the most recent is Pir Panjal in 2013. The material on this page is held in 4 captions rather than in running text, 29 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

The dated entries fall across 3 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes. The date of opening column sorts these 12 rows into 3 groups, the largest being 1998 with 9, then 03.2005 with 2 and 27.06.2013 with 1.