Road Tunnels in Switzerland — Complete List by Length, Part 000

• 267entries listed
• 0.5 kmlongest bore
• 1912–2015openings span
• 60.51 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 265 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Switzerland, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 265 rows for Switzerland are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2015 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

Lengths for Switzerland are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 13 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 38.2 times the shortest and 2.3 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

A new scheme in Switzerland would have to beat 0.5 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. Eighth on the list is Oelberg at 0.48 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

Dated entries run from 1912 to 2015, and the busiest decade is the 1970s with 44 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 267 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, Canton and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

The table below lists 267 entries with a recorded length, each giving a name, a length in metres and, where documented, the year of opening. The tunnel column names 265 distinct entries on this page, Eggrain and TC Bachet de Pesay among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

Reading the figures

Further down the table, TC Aresuse is recorded at 0.48 km and Zubringer Sud at 0.48 km. Read down the length (m) column, the 267 values run from 13 m to 496 m with a midpoint at 215 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Dates for Switzerland refer to opening to traffic, not breakthrough, so the 1912 entry was under construction for some years before that. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 60.51 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Roughly 28 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 8 distinct places and structures — Arolla, Eggrain and Zürich among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 57 distinct opening years across 103 years, and the median opening year is 1980. The material on this page is held in 12 captions rather than in running text, 85 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

The dated entries fall across 57 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes. The ten longest average 0.48 km against 0.22 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.