Railway Tunnels Longer Than 3000 Metres — a Ranked Reference List

• 238entries listed
• 4.97 kmlongest bore
• 1845–2011openings span
• 903.08 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The middle half of the table runs from 3.3 km to 4.24 km, and that band is where most of the engineering on this page actually sits. Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 0.1 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens.

The three longest entries alone account for 14.86 km of the 903.08 km on this page, which is 2 per cent of the total from 3 of 238 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 394.6 km against 508.48 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

This page records the railway tunnels catalogued for the world in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 903.08 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Dated entries run from 1845 to 2011, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 39 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 238 rows and records Country, Tunnel, Length, Date of opening and Line / Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Second and third place go to Goles at 4.95 km and Kanbara at 4.93 km. Read down the length column, the 238 values run from 3 000 m to 4 973 m with a midpoint at 3 685 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Reading the figures

Roughly 43 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 30 distinct places and structures — France, Härnösand and Veda among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

Lengths for the world are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 3 000 m and not a rounded figure. After the 2000s the next busiest decade here is the 1970s with 29 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

The 238 rows for the world are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2011 opening sits well down the table without being any less current. The ten longest average 4.92 km against 3.75 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

The dated entries carry 91 distinct opening years across 166 years, and the median opening year is 1975. The material on this page is held in 20 captions rather than in running text, 164 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 Woodhead new at 4.89 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The tunnel column names 237 distinct entries on this page, Mount Royal and Goles among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.