Railway Tunnels in Europe by Length, Part 2 — a Ranked Reference List

• 83entries listed
• 1.49 kmlongest bore
• 1848–2007openings span
• 113.27 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 1.3 km to 1.43 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 0.04 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens.

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 113.27 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 Santa Croce at 1.49 km and Pfaffensprungkehre at 1.48 km. The table on this page runs to 83 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.

Further down the table, Elic is recorded at 1.47 km and Rosenberg at 1.47 km. Read down the length column, the 83 values run from 1 250 m to 1 493 m with a midpoint at 1 370 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Dated entries run from 1848 to 2007, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 13 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 13 captions rather than in running text, 97 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 13 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 17 distinct places and structures — Barcelona, Amsterdam and Paris among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The three longest entries alone account for 4.47 km of the 113.27 km on this page, which is 4 per cent of the total from 3 of 83 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 53.41 km against 59.86 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Lengths for the world are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 1 250 m and not a rounded figure. After the 2000s the next busiest decade here is the 1990s with 9 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

The 83 rows for the world are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2007 opening sits well down the table without being any less current. Eighth on the list is Col de Malet at 1.46 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

The longest entry is 1.2 times the shortest and 1.1 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is. The ten longest average 1.47 km against 1.35 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.