Road Tunnels in Switzerland — Complete List by Length, Part 1000

• 80entries listed
• 1.95 kmlongest bore
• 1958–2015openings span
• 105.78 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 5.83 km of the 105.78 km on this page, which is 6 per cent of the total from 3 of 75 rows. After the 2000s the next busiest decade here is the 1990s with 16 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

Where one of these 75 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 75 rows for Switzerland are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2015 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

A new scheme in Switzerland would have to beat 1.95 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 1.9 times the shortest and 1.4 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

The entries sum to roughly 105.78 km of bore, an average of about 1.41 km each, though that average describes no actual row. The tunnel column names 80 distinct entries on this page, Gorges du Seyon and Steinmatten (Troingi) among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

Dated entries run from 1958 to 2015, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 21 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 80 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.

Reading the figures

Dates for Switzerland refer to opening to traffic, not breakthrough, so the 1958 entry was under construction for some years before that. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 105.78 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Roughly 24 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 18 distinct places and structures — Portals, Vaumarcus and Chables among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 29 distinct opening years across 57 years, and the median opening year is 1994. The material on this page is held in 17 captions rather than in running text, 141 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 Simplon Kulm at 1.83 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The ten longest average 1.88 km against 1.34 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

The earliest dated entry is Simplon Kulm, opened in 1970, and the most recent is Sauges in 2002. The altitudes stated in those captions run from 1 500 to 1 935 metres above sea level across 7 recorded points, which is the dimension this page is about — height, where the length tables are about span.