Railway Tunnels in Europe by Length — a Ranked Reference List

• 143entries listed
• 1.99 kmlongest bore
• 1832–2011openings span
• 243.79 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 1.58 km to 1.81 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 0.05 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens.

The three longest entries alone account for 5.96 km of the 243.79 km on this page, which is 2 per cent of the total from 3 of 143 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 112.44 km against 131.35 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 243.79 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Dated entries run from 1832 to 2011, and the busiest decade is the 1880s with 19 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 143 rows and records Country, Tunnel, Line / Location, Length and Date of opening for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Second and third place go to Ölberg at 1.99 km and Zimmerberg at 1.99 km. Read down the length column, the 143 values run from 1 500 m to 1 990 m with a midpoint at 1 710 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Reading the figures

Roughly 18 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 22 distinct places and structures — Sierra, Culebra and Barcelona 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 1 500 m and not a rounded figure. After the 1880s the next busiest decade here is the 2000s with 17 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

The 143 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. Eighth on the list is Alice Bel Colle at 1.95 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

The dated entries carry 61 distinct opening years across 179 years, and the median opening year is 1929. The material on this page is held in 22 captions rather than in running text, 146 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

The ten longest average 1.96 km against 1.69 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution. The tunnel column names 143 distinct entries on this page, Grohei and Ölberg among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.