Railway Tunnels in Norway — Complete List by Length

• 54entries listed
• 14.58 kmlongest bore
• 1908–2011openings span
• 175.75 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 35.89 km of the 175.75 km on this page, which is 20 per cent of the total from 3 of 54 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 36.96 km against 138.79 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Where one of these 54 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Norway, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 54 rows for Norway 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 Norway would have to beat 14.58 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 14.6 times the shortest and 7.7 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

10 of the 54 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 175.75 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 Lieråsen at 10.72 km and Finse at 10.59 km. Read down the length column, the 54 values run from 1 002 m to 14 580 m with a midpoint at 1 905 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Reading the figures

The ten longest average 8.63 km against 2.03 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution. The tunnel column names 54 distinct entries on this page, Romeriksporten and Lieråsen among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

Dated entries run from 1908 to 2011, and the busiest decade is the 1940s with 16 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 54 rows and records Tunnel, Length, Date of opening and Line, section for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Base tunnels driven low through a massif appear here beside the older summit tunnels they replaced. A tunnel list for Norway reads differently from a neighbouring country's: 19 of these 54 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 Hananipa at 6.1 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The dated entries fall across 29 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes.

The entries sum to roughly 175.75 km of bore, an average of about 3.25 km each, though that average describes no actual row. 17 of the 54 entries fall within a quarter of the median length, which is how tightly this particular list clusters around its typical structure.