Rack Railways of the World — 18 Recorded Entries

• 12entries listed
• 7.12 kmlongest bore
• 1896–2000openings span
• 40.59 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The median entry measures 3.1 km, so half the table sits below that and half above, which is a better guide to the typical structure here than the headline figure. The shortest recorded entry is 1.05 km against 7.12 km at the top, a spread of 6.81x across the same table.

The three longest entries alone account for 18.22 km of the 40.59 km on this page, which is 45 per cent of the total from 3 of 12 rows. 6 entries sit above the median and 6 at or below it, so the table is evenly weighted and not clustered at one end.

The next two longest are The Skitube at 6.3 km and Moelltaler Glacier Express at 4.8 km. The table on this page runs to 13 rows and records Country, Line, Constr. periode, Tunnel length and Comment for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Also recorded here are Gletscherbahn Kaprun at 3.4 km and Reisseckbahn at 2.8 km. Read down the tunnel length column, the 11 values run from 1 046 m to 7 123 m with a midpoint at 3 400 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Dated entries run from 1896 to 2000, and the busiest decade is the 1980s with 4 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 17 captions rather than in running text, 376 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Reading the figures

Roughly 1 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 33 distinct places and structures — Austria, Blue and Kitzsteinhorn among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

2 of the 12 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 40.59 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 5.69 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. The eighth longest is Funiculaire de Val d'Isère at 1.69 km, which is about where this record stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

Lengths for the world are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 1 046 m and not a rounded figure. The shorter half of the table totals 10.6 km against 29.99 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

The dated entries carry 9 distinct opening years across 104 years, and the median opening year is 1984. The altitudes stated in those captions run from 1 720 to 2 962 metres above sea level across 15 recorded points, which is the dimension this page is about — height, where the length tables are about span.