Railway Tunnels Longer Than 5000 Metres — a Ranked Reference List

• 200entries listed
• 10 kmlongest bore
• 1864–2017openings span
• 1339.14 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 29.7 km of the 1339.14 km on this page, which is 2 per cent of the total from 3 of 197 rows. After the 2000s the next busiest decade here is the 1970s with 34 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

A new scheme in the world would have to beat 10 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 2.0 times the shortest and 1.5 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

The 197 rows for the world are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2017 opening sits well down the table without being any less current. The ten longest average 9.54 km against 6.65 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

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 1339.14 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Further down the table, Thalwil I is recorded at 9.42 km and Mihualing at 9.39 km. The table on this page runs to 200 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.

Reading the figures

Second and third place go to Sangchon at 9.98 km and Ichinoseki at 9.73 km. Read down the length column, the 198 values run from 5 000 m to 9 996 m with a midpoint at 6 452 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Dated entries run from 1864 to 2017, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 35 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 37 captions rather than in running text, 341 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Roughly 41 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 62 distinct places and structures — Railway, City and Röhre 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 5 000 m and not a rounded figure. The country column sorts these 200 rows into 36 groups, the largest being Japan with 60, then Italy with 34 and China with 20.

The dated entries carry 72 distinct opening years across 153 years, and the median opening year is 1982. They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 21 words and the briefest to 6, and on a page of this kind the long ones are where the explanation lives — the caption carries what the picture cannot.