Railway Tunnels in Switzerland — Complete List by Length

• 44entries listed
• 1.99 kmlongest bore
• 1856–2004openings span
• 65.05 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 5.95 km of the 65.05 km on this page, which is 9 per cent of the total from 3 of 44 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 27.33 km against 37.72 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

The longest stands 0 km clear of the next longest, which is the margin to watch when a new scheme is announced. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 65.05 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Where one of these 44 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 44 rows for Switzerland are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2004 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

Second and third place go to Zimmerberg at 1.99 km and Vauderens at 1.98 km. Read down the length column, the 44 values run from 1 000 m to 1 987 m with a midpoint at 1 505 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

A new scheme in Switzerland would have to beat 1.99 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 1.3 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

Reading the figures

The ten longest average 1.84 km against 1.37 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution. The tunnel column names 44 distinct entries on this page, Ölberg and Zimmerberg among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

The table on this page runs to 44 rows and records 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. A hard shoulder inside a tunnel is expensive width, and its absence is why breakdowns are treated as emergencies.

Base tunnels driven low through a massif appear here beside the older summit tunnels they replaced. A tunnel list for Switzerland reads differently from a neighbouring country's: 0 of these 44 structures pass three kilometres, and the same journey time is bought with one long bore in one country and a dozen short ones in another.

The longest entry is Ölberg, at 1.99 km, opened in 1882. 44 of the 44 rows carry an entry in the line, notes column — 100 per cent of the table — and that column is where the qualifications live: tube counts, closures, boundaries and the reason a figure reads the way it does.

Eighth on the list is Bruggwald at 1.73 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The dated entries fall across 26 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes.